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“Yer bein’ all clingy again,” Yoshiki muttered, wriggling his leg in the hope that Hikaru would get the hint. Apparently however, no matter how mixed they had become, Hikaru had yet to develop the ability to read Yoshiki’s thoughts. A blessing, really. Yoshiki didn’t even want to take the first step down the road of envisioning the implications if Hikaru really did become aware of the mire of filth stagnating inside of Yoshiki’s head. Just the thought made him want to reach for his medication.
“You love it.” Hikaru lifted his head slightly from Yoshiki’s thigh, flashing him a knowing grin. The very same smirk that had gained an iron-clad hold over Yoshiki’s willpower. A worker ant, helpless to resist the slightest whim.
“...Whatever.” Yoshiki turned the next page in his book, a feeble grab at appearing the least bit busy. Never mind that the last half of the previous page would have to be left to his imagination. Maybe then at least, his thoughts would be normal for a moment or two, devoid of the joyful smile of boundless entities and raw chicken between his fingers.
Silence fell between the two for a time, Yoshiki’s legs suddenly uncomfortably sweaty, sticking to the contact of Hikaru’s skin. He wriggled again, still wondering if Hikaru might move. Praying that he didn’t.
“Wanna mix again?”
The request came as casually as if Hikaru had asked him to play a round of Smash.
Yoshiki froze, muscles tensing his body remembered the vivid sensation, an after image seared in flesh.
“You said it felt good, yeah?” Hikaru cocked his head. “I like it when ya feel good.”
Yoshiki’s mind swam, trying to remember if he had actually spouted that out loud at some point. It had been nearly impossible to speak with… with whatever Hikaru’s tendrils were made of undulating inside of his mouth.
The back of Yoshiki’s neck began to sweat, the weight of Hikaru’s slender body draped over his own suddenly suffocating.
“...My parents are home.” It was the quickest excuse that had come to mind, never mind it being the truth. Yoshiki’s dad had walked in on them once, tangled casually on the bed in what had become their default state when hanging around in Yoshiki’s room after school. Never before had being asked to come down for dinner made Yoshiki more than ever wish to melt through the floorboards, not stopping until he dropped straight into whatever level of Hell had been prepared expressly for his certain arrival. Oddly, his father hadn’t so much as batted an eye before shutting the door behind him.
Hikaru pouted, head flopping back down onto Yoshiki’s leg. “Eh, we’ll think of another place to do it, then. That’s one thing you like about this town, right? Lotsa places to be alone when ya need ‘em.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“It’s getting late.” Playfully, Yoshiki tapped Hikaru on the head with the spine of his book. “We’ll talk about it more tomorrow,” he relented.
Unfortunately, once the lights were out, Yoshiki’s mind took up the firm and certain notion that now was a perfect time to talk about it. To Yoshiki himself. At length and sundry.
They couldn’t go on like this.
Following a host of gentle reassurances on the part of Yoshiki that Hikaru wasn’t hurting him--and that he did, in fact, enjoy the mixing as much as Hikaru did--the two had once more begun to experiment tentatively over the past few weeks. The mere memory of it sent a shiver down Yoshiki’s shine, a weight lodging heavy in his stomach. Curling in on himself, Yoshiki chanced a glance downward at Hikaru, lying belly up on the futon, blanket tossed carelessly aside. Eyes still adjusting to the dark, Yoshiki imagined himself sliding down from the bed, tenderly tucking Hikaru back in. Curling up next to him until morning, all the while listening to the undead beat of Hikaru’s heart, until his back would ache from an entire night spent lying on the hard floor beside the futon.
After one more restless moment than Yoshiki could take of sleep passing him by like an indifferent classmate choosing him last for teams, finally did he slide out from beneath his blanket, bare feet meeting the welcome coolness of the floor. No matter how the heat burrowed deep inside his skin on a summer night, Yoshiki never could sleep without the same threadbare blanket he had slept under since childhood. On his bed since Kaoru was born and their mother bought them matching bed sets.
Sneaking down to the kitchen in the middle of the night was something Yoshiki had become somewhat adept at, knowing just which step on the stairs to avoid if he didn’t want it squeaking like a dying rodent at 1am.
In truth, Yoshiki wasn’t certain what exactly he planned to do in the kitchen, other than pace around aimlessly. A cursory peek inside the fridge produced little, save for disappointment. Moving onto the freezer, Yoshiki discovered the two remaining ice pops from the pack of four he had picked up from the convenience store to share with Hikaru the other day. For a brief moment, Yoshiki felt a pang of guilt as he reached for one, searing cold prickling his fingers as he pulled it from the freezer. Mercifully, guilt was as familiar to Yoshiki as the chirp of cicadas outside the kitchen window, the feeling quickly crawling back to its well-worn hole in the back of his brain. He could share some other snack with Hikaru tomorrow. Was he really so dependent on this Hikaru that couldn’t even bear to treat himself outside of his presence?
As much as his brain suggested to him that he should unpack that thought thoroughly, and urgently--and perhaps multiple times for good measure--Yoshiki instead became immediately distracted by the taste of the ice cream as it slid over his tongue. The flavor could only be described as that of plain boiled potatoes, as it gritted down his throat like sand. Promptly, Yoshiki lurched for the sink, sputtering as he spat it out. His stomach churned, in a way very different from his usual anxiety pangs.
Clearly, this was a sign that he needed to go back to bed. He was over-tired, and had eaten so much crap lately, he had made himself sick of sweets like a pre-schooler. Everything would feel normal in the morning, he assured himself, as he crept past Hikaru’s sleeping form once again.
Hazily, Yoshiki fought the leaden veil of sleep. Jostled out of dreaming by a painful ache in his jaw, accompanied by a strangely sweet taste that he found impossible to place. Sweet, and comforting, yet worryingly indulgent. A wave of sneaking guilt, as if he were taking the last cookie and leaving the empty box for his sister to find the next day. All Yoshiki knew was that he needed more. So why was an icy dread flooding his veins, urgent and insistent?
He couldn’t breathe through his mouth.
“Umph!”
Eyes shooting open, Yoshiki fully roused with the realization that something was in his mouth. Frozen in place, he realized that he was not in his bed, but rather on the floor, tangled up in the sheets Hikaru always borrowed. Even more startling were the ribbons of red and black slime undulating all around him.
“...Yoshiki?” A sleep-addled voice murmured from somewhere beside him, then growing panicked, “Yoshiki!”
Yoshiki gasped, drinking in fresh air, as the tentacle slithered free from his mouth, recoiling back into the thin gap between Hikaru’s head and neck.
“Yoshiki!” Hikaru grabbed him by the shoulders, clutching so tightly his grip approaching painful. “Are you alright? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“I… I’m fine…” Yoshiki mumbled, head spinning as he attempted to work out what had happened. The ache in his jaw was subsiding, but his mouth felt both dry and too moist at the same time. He swallowed thickly, although it did little to help. “Did I… sleep down here all night?”
“I dunno…” Hikaru’s eyes still swam with worry, and Yoshiki felt the need to look away, fixing his eyes on the Master x Master poster hanging above his head. Dully, he noticed that one of the tacks had fallen out of the corner. He’d probably step on it later. “I only woke up just now. I think I’ve been sleeping deeper ever since I gave ya that piece of me…”
Shakily, Yoshiki reached up to ruffle Hikaru’s hair, attempting to reassure him as his own mind continued to race. Everything would be fine, he could handle this, Yoshiki reminded himself. Following the incident in the school hallway, Yoshiki had come to accept that occasionally he might find himself surrounded by Hikaru’s insides at any given time. So what if the uncertainty of not knowing when to expect these episodes made his heart race in a way that he didn’t entirely dislike?
What concerned him more at the moment was having no memory of lying down and floor and… possibly, just maybe, attempting to devour a portion of Hikaru like a bowl of noodles.
“Don’t worry about it, then,” Yoshiki said, trying his best to sound unbothered. “I must have been overtired and just crashed wherever on my way back from the bathroom.”
“But I-” Hikaru began, still unsettled as he leaned into Yoshiki’s touch, butting against his palm like a cat.
“It’s getting late,” Yoshiki announced, standing so suddenly that Hikaru nearly fell backward. “We should get to class.”
“Where’s Asako?” Yoshiki asked upon spotting Yuuki, having noticed his friend's absence in class all morning.
“She’s home sick with a cold,” Yuuki sighed. “Now I’m probably going to catch it too, since I’m the one bringing over her homework an’ all.”
Relieved that whatever it was that Hikaru had done to her that day hadn’t worsened, Yoshiki sank onto the bench beside her. It was surprisingly decent outside for the time of year, the humidity taking a rare day off, and a handful of the students had chosen to eat outside.
“Tell her I hope she feels better,” Yoshiki said. When was the last time he had spent time with just Yuuki like this? Usually, it was the five of them. Unless, of course, it was just him and Hikaru.
“What happened to Hikaru?” Yuuki asked in turn, almost as if she could sense Yoshiki thinking about him.
“One of the teachers asked him to take some paperwork to the office,” Yoshiki answered, unwrapping the yakisoba bun he had bought for lunch. “He’ll be back soon- Ya know how he hates to miss lunch.”
Yuuki nodded in agreement, taking a bite of her own lunch.
It was then that Yoshiki saw it- a tiny flicker of light radiating off of Yuuki’s chest. Yoshiki blinked, trying to clear his eyes in the bright sun.
It must have been only the sun. Yeah, just the sun…
The sun, causing his stomach to claw at its own lining and beg. For what, Yoshiki did not want to know.
Shrugging it off, he took a bite of his own bun. A texture that could only be described as that of pencil shavings met his tongue as he forced it down.
Thankfully, no one else was in the boys’ bathroom as Yoshiki leaned over the sink, splashing cold water onto his face.
He must have come down with something, he thought. Food always tasted different when he had a cold, after all. Whatever it was that Asako had must have been going around.
As he stood there, eyes closed, water dripping from his long bangs, Yoshiki’s forearm began to itch, as it did now and again, deep inside the mottled area where Hikaru had left his mark. Toweling off his face, what Yoshiki saw in the mirror gripped his stomach in an icy vice.
Translucent, filmy and delicate, like the wings of a dragonfly. Wispy black and red tendrils, no more than a few centimeters long, danced along his arm. Swirly merrily, as if joyful to be born from Yoshiki’s body into the wide and waiting world.
He was going to be sick.
“Yoshiki…?” Hikaru sat perched on the edge of Yoshiki’s bed, face still painted with the same worry from that morning. That same eye-brows knitted, down-turned mouth, lost-puppy expression that always ran Yoshiki’s heart though a paper shredder.
Wordlessly, Yoshiki held out his arm for Hikaru to see. Obediently, the tendrils performed their twirling and twisting parade for an audience of one.
“I’m changing.”
The words were devoid of any accusation.
Yoshiki would never undo a moment--a single second--of anything they had done together. Poor judgement, teenage impulses, acts and sensations that no other human yet had a name for- Yoshiki wanted to build a monument to every single jagged piece living inside of his mind. One that he might pray to everyday, for forgiveness, for the selfish, greedy want of more.
Even so, the fact of the matter remained, hanging heavy between them.
Yoshiki was becoming something. Something distinctly to the left of human.
“They’re beautiful.” Hikaru’s eyes grew wide with awe, worshipful, as if Heaven itself had shone a beacon of light down upon Yoshiki Tsujinaka, and him alone.
Yoshiki wanted to run. He wanted to shove Hikaru, scream at him, anything to stop him from making that face. Tear the adoration straight from the core of whatever it was that had replaced his beating heart.
Instead, he stayed in place, standing in the middle of his bedroom floor. Somehow, somehow, they always wound up back here. Like a recurring dream they could never wake from. Two worms crawling back into the same cocoon.
“I’m a monster.” A caterpillar could perform its metamorphosis, but a moth could never become a butterfly.
“Same here, remember?” A swirl of unknowable void began to leak from one of Hikaru’s eyes, spectral fondness oozing down his cheek. “Ya told me that you wouldn’t want me to be anythin’ else.”
As Hikaru spoke, Yoshiki saw it- the very same glow that had emanated from Yuuki earlier. Only brighter, shining with such rampant brilliance that it stung Yoshiki’s eyes. The nameless, formless, incomprehensible being now known as Hikaru had a soul. Just the same as he had claimed to have seen in Yoshiki.
Glorious, radiant. Yoshiki found himself entranced, drawn to it like an ice-cold bottle of water on a hot summer’s day. If he could just touch, taste it, drink it in, he would be fully refreshed. Something deep inside of him--deeper than the place he kept his filthy desires buried behind boarded up walls--pooled to overflowing with want. A craving so voracious, the already crumbling walls inside of his mind burst into flame, burning straight to the ground.
“Hikaru, I-”
Yoshiki felt himself cross the room, legs puppeteered by his own perverse desires, until he was kneeling before Hikaru where he sat on the bed.
“Yer parents are at work,” Hikaru teased, with that damn seductive grin, the one he must have known full well that Yoshiki was helpless against. An ant staring down the mouth of a pitcher plant.
One by one, Yoshiki undid the buttons on Hikaru’s uniform, picking unwanted seeds from a slice of watermelon in want of unencumbered access to the sweet flesh in between.
No words were needed. Like breathing, like sleeping, Yoshiki’s body knew what he needed to do. The only sound in the room was that of Hikaru’s soft gasp as Yoshiki gently teased his fingers between the opening.
“Do I still feel like raw chicken?” Hikaru asked playfully between shaky breaths.
“Nah…” Yoshiki continued to stroke at the unknowable spiraling mass that compromised Hikaru’s true form, swirling his fingers playfully around and between like a child making a mess with finger-paints. The shapes and forms created within only decipherable to their maker. “It’s more like petting a salamander now. Real nice.”
“That’s good… I think…” Hikaru laughed weakly, curling in on himself like a fiddle-head fern closing up for the night, forehead dropping onto Yoshiki’s shoulder. “Yoshiki… nn… Yer arm…”
The writhing ribbons snaking out of Yoshiki’s arm lapped hungrily at the gap in Hikaru’s chest, tasting, begging for permission to join Yoshiki’s hand inside.
“Oh…”
Before Yoshiki’s body allowed him a moment to think, the sheer want gnawing in the back of his head lashed out, a hunting dog let off leash. The tendrils seemed to take this as an invitation, worming their way inside of Hikaru’s chest, dragging in the rest of his arm up to the elbow.
“Hah!” Yoshiki yelped, the familiar mixture of fear and pleasure tossed aside the script of shame Yoshiki had recited by heart, scribbling in a new sensation between the lines with a bold red pen.
The tendrils--his tendrils--were mixing with Hikaru’s. He could feel them latching onto those comprising Hikaru’s inner form, curling around them, squeezing tight as a tourniquet, cutting off any flow of common sense to Yoshiki’s brain.
Hazily, Yoshiki managed to focus his eyes on Hikaru, face still flushed as he gripped Yoshiki’s shoulders. His human face had reformed at some point, however his eyes still glowed an unnatural red, staring glassy into a place that Yoshiki doubted his own mind could fathom.
“Is this…” Yoshiki took a breath, pushing down a wave of dull panic. He could swear his tendrils were beginning to sever Hikaru’s now--popping them like a child squeezing the head off of a toy doll--chunking them into smaller bits and pieces, making them easier to… to… Yoshiki didn’t even know. “Is this okay? Will I hurt you?”
“Dunno…” Hikaru breathed. “Still feels nice… Like, hurts a little, but the kinda hurts like when the other Hikaru would pick at a scab… Satisfyin’…? Just…just don’t stop, not yet.”
Despite Hikaru’s words, Yoshiki knew that they should stop right then and there, come to a screeching halt before they crash. If the act of mixing had transformed Yoshiki to such a grotesque extent, what might become of Hikaru? What if he hurt him, broke something inside of him, not knowing how to control this strange new part of himself?
Don’t. Stop.
“Okay.”
Closing his eyes, Yoshiki’s senses were immediately overwhelmed, surrounded by Hikaru’s true form as it spilled out endlessly, enveloping him in a thick, suffocating blanket of the utmost discomforting, ecstasy.
But this time… Yoshiki could touch back. Like a man who had lived his entire life in a tropical climate suddenly experiencing the foreign touch of snow for the first time, Yoshiki was enthralled. Rather than feeling swallowed up as he had previously, his own unnatural substance touched Hikaru back, consuming in turn. Rushing in a hideous wave, it filled the void in Hikaru’s chest, muffling any further purrs or gasps as the stuff covered his mouth, mixing with the swirling ichor still leaking from his face.
Not enough.
Too much.
More.
More.
More.
Whatever the stuff Hikaru was made of, it now felt as at home inside of Yoshiki’s mouth as the ice cream that Hikaru loved to share with him so much. At what point Hikaru had flowed so fully into him, Yoshiki wasn’t certain. All that mattered was that Hikaru was there and Yoshiki needed him, needed this.
Consumed by feral instinct, using every ounce of power in his tongue and jaw, Yoshiki slurped at the tendril, sucking it down his throat. Writhing grotesquely all the way down until it finally snapped, the remaining length of it recoiling out from between his lips with wet pop. As with the other times Hikaru had invaded his mouth, there was no taste in the traditional sense, yet every nerve in his tongue and throat tingled mercilessly, firecrackers whirling through his skull.
Just as the black spiked edges of unconsciousness began to prickle at the edges of Yoshiki’s mind, the experience was over.
Blinking a time or two until his vision came back into focus, Yoshiki caught only the final vestiges of Hikaru’s innards returning to their shell, the hole in his chest knitting shut to reveal nothing but milky smooth flesh.
“Ya alright?” Hikaru asked immediately, hands on either side of Yoshiki’s cheeks, as Yoshiki hadn’t just consumed a portion of him. “I tried t’ make sure you could breathe this time, but I think I might have-”
“I think I ate part of you,” Yoshiki commented dully.
“Oh…” Hikaru turned thoughtful, still cupping Yoshiki’s face. “I don’t feel any different though, so I think I’m okay. But what about you? I know yer tummy gets all screwed up if you eat anythin’ that ain’t plain tofu.”
“You know that ain't true.” Yoshiki sighed fondly, a half smile forming on lips, still slick with saliva and a strange, sticky fluid that held no name. “But, yeah, now that ya mention it… I think I feel better than I have in a while.”
It was true, the gnawing hunger and voracious sense of craving inside of him seemed to have vanished altogether, evaporated like dew spirited away by a thirsty morning sun.
Yoshiki chanced a glance at his own arm. While the otherworldly bruise remained eerily prominent as ever, the tendrils had receded back inside of flesh for the moment. And he could almost pretend they weren’t lying dormant just beneath the skin, ready and waiting.
A weary embrace was all that it took to topple Hikaru down onto the bed beside him, lying face to face in a tangle of lanky teenage limbs.
“Hey,” Yoshiki mumbled into Hikaru’s hair. “Wanna go for ice cream tomorrow?”