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Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.— Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas.
It starts, as most things tend to, with Asakura Shin. He’s the kind of boy you find between blades of grass, roots like sickness branching into your healthy soil, so that even your wounds are fertile. His hair is corn yellow and he smells like all things tropical, lush, an amazonian summer. He’s loud and clumsy and warm like he’s got a piece of sun snagged on his intricate nervous system— the brightest thing Mafuyu has ever chanced upon.
Shin is weak and annoying and kind of stupid really, but he’s also kind, selfless, and he doesn’t regard Mafuyu’s aversion to touch and dirtiness with disdain like most people do. Instead, he stands two steps too far, gives Mafuyu just enough room to reach out if he so wanted, or retract into himself without it feeling like the chasm between him and the world just grew miles larger, without his deadweight drooping between his feet. He speaks to Mafuyu in an indulgent though impatient timbre, like he’s a misbehaving child and that’s all he is and has to be, with nothing but time to grow into his own skin. He touches Mafuyu only through his shirt, yanks on the fabric with all his strength to pull him out of harm’s way, his own guardian angel in a worn out tee and a bad dye job. An assassin who steps only in the spaces between flowers.
For someone like Mafuyu who has only ever known touch that bears destruction, loose teeth, who’s learned that a father can be a monster with a third eye and wrath that courses through his veins like ashes, that a brother would go to bring you milk for your nightmares only for your father to walk into your room and scream at your face— Shin’s accommodations had something inside him shifting, swelling and festering. He wonders if it would fall out on the ground, all meaty and dark and abominable, were Shin to slit him at his belly? If Shin would step on it, were Mafuyu to ask it of him?
It’s an unsettling thought. A frightening one. It has the jumbled chemicals in his brain flaring. And when he clings onto Shin’s sleeve and cries because he’s exhausted and overwhelmed and maybe just a little bit scared, he finds himself wondering if holding Shin’s hand would set him ablaze. If Shin’s hair is warm and coarse from having the sun run its fingers through it all day. But he saves himself from the embarrassment that is spinning around in his own filth, only is it filth when you want it this bad?
Little boy in hunger’s cradle,
nursed on onion blood.
Like any teenage boy, Mafuyu wonders. Like any teenage boy, he hungers. He watches. He observes. He's alive and alight and seething.
His eyes follow Gaku during their sparring sessions; how Gaku’s fist slows down just that much before it grazes Mafuyu’s body, and he’s unsure if it’s attentiveness or distraction that stops Gaku from shattering his bones. He notices how Toramaru’s fingers never shy away from blood and gore, precise and unapologetic as she disinfects the scrap on his knee, eyebrows knitted in concentration. How Kashima’s hands toil away under a militant lamplight, all sorts of devices and gadgets coming alive at the prodding of his fingers. Back hunched over his workstation with the devotion of a false god.
It’s about hands, Mafuyu decides. The assassin world is all about hands. It's about shoving filthy merciless hands down bile-washed throats. About shredding one’s soul with a pair of cheap latex gloves. About one’s skin dressing up in lesions from the touch of strangers’ hands, a kiss no different from a gunshot. It's all about hands. Nails drawing crescent blood. Ash-smudged fingers stitching gaping wounds. Knuckles crushing reflections behind a thin layer of gun smoke and glass. Hands, hands, hands.
Uzuki Kei’s hands translate into gentle brutality, cruel fragility, making incisions around drear abdomens to inject some sense of benediction, silicone divinity. A greater purpose. When he places those hands on Gaku’s neck, firm and guiding and ever blue, telling him, “I’m counting on you,” Gaku’s grip loosens around his mace just slightly, unintentionally, something so delicate you wouldn’t catch it if you weren’t looking. You wouldn’t believe it could come from such a cruel body.
Gaku’s own hands smell like soap, and would split the horizon apart like a peach if he bothered to put down his gaming console. Or if Uzuki asked it of him. The seconds tend to slink slowly over his knuckles, and his spider leg fingers. Something haunting yet tactful about eight legs, about Gaku’s fingers. His paper mache veins. He places his palm on Mafuyu’s abdomen, and Mafuyu shivers, grits his teeth so as not to cower like a hurt dog under his touch. “You have to focus your strength on your core to stabilize it and let gravity guide your arms and legs,” he says, monotonous, bored. “You rely on close combat in your attacks which is fun, but you expose yourself to a lot of risk. Hmm, think of it like this; it’s like golf, you get good hits with good form.”
In a world where there’s no Natsuki, Mafuyu sometimes contemplates, terror and wonder gripping him in equal measure, he would’ve grown up with these guys at Al-Kamar. He would’ve run errands for Kumanomi, would’ve sought and preened at Haruma’s praise.
He wonders if he too would’ve dried and dissolved into Slur's palms like the rest of them. If his gentle touch would’ve annihilated, but also, resurrected him.
Natsuki’s hands, when Mafuyu stops to think about them, are fiendishly pale, so translucent the blood cells might die just by the sun, skin so paper thin the rays would see right through him down to his intricate machine core. Calloused fingertips like wide plateaus, twanging strings, tied around Mafuyu’s wrists and guiding him through the liquid darkness and night howls of the forest where they trained, tethering him to earth, to his own body. Those same hands pry a microscopic bomb from between his muscles and tendons and spaghetti blood vessels and the pain has Mafuyu nearly grinding his teeth to milk. He rips open like teddy bear flesh. And for a second he imagines he’d leak stuffing, or that his blood staining Natsuki’s fingers and clothes would smell of baby spit and dust bunnies, of the childhood they never had.
Those red hands curl firmly on Mafuyu’s thighs as Natsuki carries him on his back, shoulders rising and falling with exertion, like salacious waves, fleeing from Uzuki and his goons and the JAA’s assassins and their dad and the whole world— Shin right there by their side, in the eye of the storm, sweat on his neck like silver bullets. Their guardian angel. And it’s not the blind agony of pain, but his heart stutters stammers stumbles in his chest when Natsuki ruffles his hair, mumbling, “I’d burn the whole world before I let anything happen to you. Besides, everybody is too dumb to keep up with me anyway.”
How many linnets take off,
wings fluttering, from your body!
Is it really filth when people yearn for it like this, Mafuyu asks himself. Being friends with the dirt and the things it spits out and the centuries of carcasses it swallows in its warm brown mouth? He watches Natsuki’s hand, calloused and oily and almost robotic in its steadiness, tinkering with some new weapon. Natsuki’s hand, gentle and lazy and incessant as if seeking absolution, dallying with the threads of Shin’s ripped jeans, chasing the skin beneath as if it’s made of silk where others have bones of fossil. Is it really filth?
When all the smoke settles and Mafuyu finally wears shoes with no hidden blades in them, people-watching becomes more of a hobby and less of an obsession; no longer an act committed in stolen moments and with so much intensity he sometimes envisioned his eyes popping out by a rusted spring, like a googly-eyed teddy bear. Gradually, naturally, he arrives at the realization that sometimes the enormity of one’s feelings is consuming, all-encompassing, far too big to be contained within one’s own body. Clogs one’s arteries and guides his bones into corners and angles, into seeking out someone else’s skin in hopes of alleviating some of this sickness, this fever. He learns that sometimes one’s desire is simply too powerful it can only be contained in two bodies; demands that they perform a dance for this inferno.
It's funny how kilometres look so insignificant from a distance. Suddenly the chasm between Mafuyu and the world is no more than a wrinkle in space, a wormhole. He watches Shin and Natsuki with a child-like wonder, one that was not scavenged from Sunday morning apple pies nor the scent of freshly washed linen, but rather from playing with liquid nitrogen bombs, bladed shoes and rubik cubes at the tender age of seven.
"I have a process," Natsuki says, lifting the welding hood off his face. They’re all in his workshop, because it’s nice and warm and fun to snoop around in. It feels like picking your way through a slaughter, looking for something to salvage.
Shin, who’s been talking Mafuyu’s ear off about how it’s a good idea —brilliant really, he's beamed— to get a cat, suddenly perks up, abandons his monologue in favor of walking up to Natsuki. "Excuse me?"
“A process, Shin.” Natsuki breathes through his nose, words slow and unspooling like thread, “I don't. I can't... work with someone breathing down my neck, so please be quiet for a little while."
Shin nods his head jerkily and actually shuts up. Mafuyu deduces it’s only because Natsuki is working on a new glove for him (Shin has asked for it only like a hundred times before Natsuki complied). Between the whistling of the AC and the sputters of fluorescent lights and the sharp whirring from Natsuki’s desk, Shin lasts about a minute.
"So... is it done yet?"
Natsuki doesn’t look up. "Shh."
Approximately thirty seconds later, Shin bites his lip viciously to stop himself from smiling. Mafuyu can feel his own twitching under the mask. “How 'bout now?"
Annoyed, Nastuki says, "Quiet."
Immediately, Shin trudges even closer, smiling so wide the lights nearly reflect off his teeth. "What about now?"
This time Natsuki stops what he’s doing and spins around on his chair, visibly irritated. "Shut the fuck up already,” he says through gritted teeth. "God."
“Wow,” Shin laughs, poking Natsuki on the cheek, “Let no man ever say you don’t have a temper!”
Surprisingly, Natsuki only grumbles under his breath, hand mindlessly resting on the cheek Shin was teasing, as if seeking out the residue of his touch. The lingering heat. Mafuyu can’t help the small laugh that escapes him. It was only one time that Natsuki and he talked about Shin. They found a mutual interest in chewing him up like mint flavored gum, picking out all his flaws and lining them in order of intolerability, Mafuyu endlessly thrilled by the way Natsuki’s eyes, often flat and cold and looking right past you, gleamed just so with every roll of Shin’s name off his tongue. It’s in that very moment that Mafuyu realizes it.
He thinks back to Gaku on his knees, eyes alight with mischief and anticipation. Worship. Chasing Uzuki’s skin that was almost always sticky, drenched in blood sacrifice or the residue of grand promises, raw divinity— like he wanted to get his gargoyle mouth all over it, trail his fingers across it and carve storms underneath it. And he did. His hands were on Uzuki’s trousers in an instant, unbuckling his belt with a focus so sharp it could cut like a sword, the air electrocuting, like he’d finally found a game challenging enough to be worth his while. “Say, what was my record last time? I got you to cum in two minutes? I’m aiming for one today. Brace yourself, Kei.”
Mafuyu didn’t stick around long enough to find out, because the second Gaku leaned up, tongue first, to kiss Uzuki, all two hundred and six bones of his body drawn taught, one touch away from snapping like cherry twigs— he ran off with a terrified squeak. And so when he catches a glimpse of Shin and Natsuki on the couch late at night, shoulders hunched, faces towards each other, kissing like boys with hot coal between their teeth; their heads the shape of a heart— Shin whispers, “You do realize I know you’ve been thinking about getting me naked all night, right? Are you actually gonna do it or should I do it myself?” and Mafuyu chooses to forget about the glass of water he got up for.
Shin eventually does get a cat. And though Mafuyu thinks it’s a mere bag of germs and wants to wash his hands until his skin chafes whenever he accidentally touches it, he doesn’t tell it off when it coils around his leg and purrs. And he isn’t as bothered as he thought he’d be when he wakes up to find it curled up on his stomach.
“Tch, stupid cat,” he complains, but his heart leaps when the cat stirs only to curl up tighter, and the world brightens just so. He can’t help petting it, the shine and smoothness of its fur a tart treat to be savored.
It’s safe to say it comes as no shock to him when Natsuki and Shin sit him down to tell him they’re dating now, and I hope it isn’t, like, weird or uncomfortable for you, Shin says kindly. Natsuki is absently running his thumb along the back of Shin’s neck, and Shin’s ankle is looping around Natsuki’s nervously; sun and moon, Mafuyu concludes, locked in a gravitational war, bound to cross and bound to fall apart.
Mafuyu doesn’t bother rolling his eyes, instead opts for dramatically putting his hand over his mouth and drawls, “Oh god, what other groundbreaking news do you have for me, the sky is blue?”
“I’ll throw a wrench at you and pretend it’s the cat,” Shin threatens.
“The cat likes me too much to throw a wrench at me,” Mafuyu huffs, crossing his arms.
“Also,” Natsuki hums thoughtfully, “It doesn’t have thumbs, so.”
Shin buries his face in his palms. The very picture of despair. Mafuyu thinks it’s cute and tries his hardest to banish the thought before Shin catches it as it shuttles the coils of his brain. Sometimes looking at Shin makes him feel like shitting rainbows out of his eyes. It's weird.
“You both are insufferable.”
“I—“ Mafuyu starts, at a loss. He suddenly feels impossibly young, cloudy-eyed, pliant, defined by no more than the softness to his cheeks that he can’t quite floss in the bathroom sink. He bows his head until it nearly touches his knees to avoid Natsuki’s clever eyes. I’m happy for you, he thinks. Both of you. He thinks it loud and clear and open for Shin to hear.
And he does, because the next thing Mafuyu knows is Shin standing before him, and his proximity brings forth a familiar warmth. “Aww,” he says, flushing from the neck up, patting Mafuyu’s hair affectionately. “He’s happy for us in his head but too shy to say it, Natsuki. Isn’t he just so cute?”
It sounds like it should be taunting but it’s sweet and genuine and has Natsuki smiling secretly into his shoulder. The moment leaves a soft ache, like fingerprints all over Mafuyu’s chest.
“Shut up!” he squeaks.
I’m happy you’re happy, his thoughts chant and his fingers are starting to split apart and dissolve into the atmosphere the more Shin coddles him. And it's funny, really. He thinks he might actually mean it.
Keep to your cradle, defending laughter
feather by feather.