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Tsurugi is trained well in field tactics, but not in interrogation.
Utsuro's gaze is angled up at him, still and inscrutable as the water of a lake.
Containing, as all lakes do, an aphotic zone.
Tsurugi bares his gritted teeth at what to him is but a man. Tsurugi is angry enough for his arms to shake.
Utsuro has cast off that jacket that belonged to that other student, that first victim, somewhere into that empty space in this prison where sunlight cannot reach.
Respect shown retrospectively—remorse—does not matter to Tsurugi Kinjo.
Perhaps there was a fleeting instant when it had. He barely acknowledges it except as an effect akin to a retinal burn from a light too brilliant to fully process before it can no longer be viewed, a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event which he is cursed to spend all his days remembering.
He has always viewed the event horizon for criminals as the earliest point on a long road.
Almost without exception.
Almost.
Utsuro's in a sitting position, back laid against the headboard. Utsuro’s eyes remain dull. He makes no effort to speak. He doesn't lift a finger, and the space around them doesn't corrupt in his wake. He's still fully clothed, for now. He would have remained silent even if his mouth wasn't taped shut; that was just done out of anger. He's staring up at Tsurugi with no real focus. One, two, three, four beats. A blink, not the blinking that humans do when they want to force a reset, when they're thinking about something, but automatic. His eyes search him for nothing and note nothing with interest, with no side to side waver.
Utsuro's muscles do not tense in anticipation of impact. That matter is a four-piece grid. If someone would have been interested in minimizing the tissue damage but does not see the injury coming, they do not tense up. If someone is interested in minimizing the damage and sees it coming, they tense up. If someone knows the potential of the encounter and has come to terms with it, they do not tense up. It is the last type of enemy that is the most dangerous and the least predictable. Is it out of apathy? There were surely those years when you wanted something out of the world, weren't there? I, who could never reach my ideals, and you, who never wanted anything more than to have some of them be out of reach.
Tsurugi is no sadist. He inflicts pain as has ever been necessary to neutralize the enemy. He has kept Utsuro's mouth shut half to ensure that, no matter what happens, Tsurugi does not fix his hands around Utsuro's neck. He can't forgive him for that beautiful lie.
The sharp downward curve of Tsurugi's brow loosens, and he rakes his hand down Utsuro's cheek, a scraping touch, not a clawing. It feels like human skin, shifts slightly to meet him. He recoils instinctively when he gets to those locks of hair matted with oils, not quite unwashed but lacking ordinary care and diligence. Tsurugi brushes his own hair away, not with the intention of exposing "that" eye, but with the intention of improving his depth perception to facilitate a finer motor control, and imagines he sees Utsuro's eyes widen. They lack still the vibrance and transfixing curiosity that he remembers of these eyes.
There you are, he thinks, looking over those parts of the body exposed by Utsuro's indifference to society, his lack of willingness to participate in it. I've finally caught you.
Without saying a word, Tsurugi buttons Utsuro's dress shirt.
Utsuro looks away as Tsurugi redoes Utsuro's tie.
Maeda's dress shirt hadn't been done perfectly evenly on its edges, had it? It had been so long ago, without photographs, that...
Utsuro closes his eyes when Tsurugi undoes the chain on the first arm to pull the sleeve of that shirt down, holding it out limply, relaxed. It's slow. Tsurugi's own heartbeat quickens as he does it, as to be audible to him. He resets the chain over the fabric.
That process is then repeated on the second arm, with the same care.
---
This was, from the outset, a visit that Tsurugi shouldn't have been making, but one that no one in good conscience could deny him. This was not a consultation in the routine course of duty. At first, Mekaru had taken it for Tsurugi attempting to lose himself in the corrupted data and follow Teruya, and had tried to stop him midway through, but the readings had been stable.
They had agreed that if Utsuro showed signs of responding to anything that happened, or made even a muffled sound, then Tsurugi would remove the tape.
Maintaining self-control throughout is imperative to achieve the mission objective.
In this second phase, Tsurugi starts to remove Utsuro's clothing, article by article. He casts aside that tie first. He has to temporarily unchain Utsuro's arms to get the vest off of him, but Utsuro doesn't respond with any effort to take control of the situation. Truthfully, Tsurugi is no fool: if Utsuro had willed it in any of those preceding moments, anything could have been done to him.
When Tsurugi grips the corner of Utsuro's dress shirt to try and pull it up to expose his chest, Utsuro looks irritated. That expression causes a threat response, embedded deep in Tsurugi's nerves, an unaccounted for activation in a network of scar tissue that should not be as capable as it has been rendered of responding to stimuli, a stabbing throb in his right eye. He leaves it down, not out of fear of the pain, but out of a lingering fear of failure.
There is no similar answer when his dress shoes clatter to the floor, and no dissent when Tsurugi insists that Utsuro finish stripping his lower half.
It would be nothing for him to do it.
This is an effort to make Utsuro feel less in control.
---
Utsuro's breathing starts out even, easier to track the rhythm of as the result of being from the nose. Tsurugi is far from certain of what to do; he had always forbidden himself from association with men. He had barely even allowed himself any pleasure in the past except as deemed absolutely necessary to clear that recurrent cognitive fog of biology. There is no moment in which the consummate officer is not on duty.
He will try, of course. He cannot help but try.
Tsurugi Kinjo pulls Utsuro closer into position, flat on his back, takes off Utsuro's socks so that he is fully exposed to him, and locks the chains into place for the last time. He cannot bear the sight of those clothes discarded, and so slowly, silently, he gets up to fold them.
Utsuro is not, after all, going anywhere, and the longer he takes to start, the more anticipation it will build.
He kneels, still in his uniform, placing his knees in between the space below Utsuro's own to deny him the possibility of closing his legs.
In partial wonderment, he starts rubbing the place that makes the most sense, the most obvious one to him, while it is still dry. It hardens. Rises. Familiarly enough. The pace of Utsuro's breath does not meaningfully change, but his legs spread further so that Tsurugi can no longer feel them, against all expectation. Encouraging. Tsurugi's pace quickens. Utsuro stares irresolutely at the ceiling and Tsurugi wonders for an instant if it should have been filled with mirrors before deciding that, no, that would remind his target of who he now is, when he means for him to slip back into that illusion, the only real Maeda to him, the one to which his very existence is now linked. The one that likely called out to him for help in his dreams.
While trying to study the expression of the wakeful god, Tsurugi's finger slips just the slightest bit necessary to discover that there is slick just below that first structure. Adding it to the equation creates a more definitive response.
Tsurugi abandons his station to instead position his face over Utsuro's, trying to ensure that he sees; it's more difficult to keep his accuracy this way, reaching back, his attention no longer focused, but he senses it is what will give him the best chance of completing this endeavor. The effect is pronounced. Utsuro averts his gaze, trying to tip his head to the side. Tsurugi expresses his ambivalence at this human gesture by tilting Utsuro's head back to him with his free arm while starting to thrust downwards and deeper with the other, and Utsuro's breath suddenly becomes faster and less rhythmic, shocked at a type of selfish desire which does not part for him at the slightest sign of him willing it.
At the crest of it, sometime after Utsuro's legs start to go firmer against the bed and he starts to move up to try and chase Tsurugi's touch but before the split-second contracting clenching and grinding of his back into the covers that Tsurugi instinctively senses might come with orgasm, there is silence. His eyes close. He starts to seem confused, then to start thrashing, then to forgive Tsurugi and go still again once he opens those enlightened eyes: but it is forgiveness for a type of pain he has caused.
Something pierces Tsurugi's heart and, without hesitating, like drawing and firing, he mindlessly rips off the tape.
The stimulation up until now has been transferred, a terrible thing, for Tsurugi cannot stay with him through the entire journey.
But he spends those few seconds as Yuki Maeda.
Tsurugi Kinjo spends those few seconds with Yuki Maeda.
It is enough to ignite in him that same foreboding obsession that led him to cast lives aside to promote it.
It is enough to bring tears to his eyes when he returns to waking life, when he finds himself removed from that digital subdimension. He hides them from Utsuro, not really on account of him believing any longer that Utsuro means to exploit that deepest vulnerability and drive him back into the depths of despair, but out of that great and terrible habit, that inability to view himself as human.