FANFICTION ⇌ 「 DOGS/Deadman Wonderland 」 Genkaku & Badou. ``polychromatic.``
Ugh god fuck. This ship is ... just. I can't even.
WHAT THE HELL IT'S LIKE THREE THOUSAND WORDS I DON'T EVEN.
oh my god rabid fuck you for being a constant inspiration YOU ARE GOING TO DRAIN ME DRY YOU FUCKING INCUBUS.
(it'll be like the best creative orgasm i ever had.)
There are three places in the world Badou feels safe.
The first is likely the most glaringly obvious to those who get close to him. It is a place of both recompense and business, a place of black corners that are better taken care of than his gun, no dirt and grime in her mechanisms. She's got a pretty, glass (breakable) face on top of that boxy black body, and his fingers rake down her form with every meaning of discovering worlds through her, inside her. The things she shows him ...
She is his first lover, if only out of necessity (the way killing has become second-nature, as are his fingers on her buttons, ticking and tweaking and turning her just right).
The shutter clicks and whirrs.
He is safe behind his camera, he is safe digging up the muddy secrets of Thor because there is no Below here; there are no Dirty Dreams or Sicilian Mobs to drag him down to underworlds. (No, there are only Sicilian Snakes that aren't actually from Sicily.)
The second is not so obvious but not so intimate. Few have ever seen him sleep, even fewer willingly (because of the exact thing he numbers off as things come in threes in his head). Sure, he can pass out anywhere, in any position, in any particular mood (other than tripwiretrapinsane, obviously), but he has to feel ...
well.
Safe.
And once he is asleep, he is safe, because his brain no longer registers danger. Nightmares do not plague him. Deceitful dreams do not beckon him. His heart rate drops even more, the parted rasp of his dry lips descends, and he falls into worlds of undeveloped and/or overexposed film. No film negatives spinning backwards, no ancient old memories with their dirty sepia corners, no worlds of too much noise like gunfire or party noisemakers or his own psychotic laughter as he paints walls red.
No nothing. And Nothing is Safe.
The last ... is not a conscious decision. It's not even truth. It is a lie his mind has lulled his body into believing, like a manipulated photograph for that slap-it-tap-it worthy chick to have nice tits and a nice face. It is the mentality of trust (a sharp, horrible thing that he feels like corners raking at the ivory insides of his ribcage) cloaked in his junkyard-items body (fencepost hips and letteropener teeth, skeletonkey fingers and jailbars-for-arms) in the guise of slumber. It is the way he can close his eyes and dream without sleeping, the way he can imagine and pretend in waking hours, the way a snake's daydreams are more enchanting than a Wise Bird's morning call for early worms. Technicolor had seemed overrated since the Wizard of Oz days.
It is in the crackle of electricity that passes along rotting barb-wire thorns and goes straight into salvation-propaganda motes, pulling down guitar neck drawbridges to send real shock value!! into the safety(-hazard)'s castle of corpses.
Playing with fire is not wise nor safe, but if you've got an inferno on your side, you will never fear hell.
"Ya lost in thought again, yeah?" says the (Third Safety) suihomocidist from behind him, and it makes the his one-eyed gaze go starksharp to the leather-clad limbs on either side of his own lap. His own too-long legs are hitched off the bench, crossed at the ankles, ass barely slid into the bench between the two more encompassing (snakes shouldn't have legs!), with his First Safety in three large pieces on his lap. (His Second Safety is a beguiling call, as dawn has [been] broken and little alien children are skittering or slithering into a nearby school, which is a signal for them both to crawl back into nest havens and snake pits.)
"Shuddup," he snaps as two pieces of the camera click back together and the focus of the lens adjusts, pauses, adjusts, and gives an agreeable humclickclick (approval of her master's erotic fingers). The only response from his real lover (the one of flesh and bone) is an ashen chuckle.
He can feel the way the man moves, the bottom of his belly brushing the slack of his ugly green coat and making them tremble with his laughter. It is picturesque in his mind how his arms are thrown carelessly over the backs of the simple bench in the slums, smoke rolling thoughtlessly, the tensionenergy of his knee right beside him bouncing on the arc of his boot. One leg tucked, one leg out, two silent proclamations of this is mine and this is not yours.
Badou twitchily smacks the vibrating limb with the back of a scarred hand, earning another filament-shifting chuckle. "What it do, Super Monk?" is the drawl. "Y'seem itchy."
"Yeah, well, f'I am, it's 'cuz'a you. Grab a disease from a toilet seat, Fox?"
"You sittin' at my back right now, ain't ya?" It's not a harsh inquiry in the least, and it's not more like a statement, but Genkaku can feel it's hidden meanings by the way the cameralover snaps closed.
He's asking about regret.
"Nah. I'm a smoker."
Badou smiles but doesn't flash it over his shoulder, instead exhales (not smoke but steam from breath in colder air, and who knew he was warm enough inside to actually make it?). It's enough. His shoulders slack down as a humanoid kid runs late to class with his backpack jolted and clinging to one arm.
They are waiting. Waiting for the MudKids to return to their societies and for their sloppy pies to harden into dirt that will get smeared into wounds on knuckles or bittengritted between teeth. It's one of the monk's favorite getaways, those times he's just Too Tired To Sleep, when Badou can hang back and admire the way his clothes lax and stretch differently when he's too-big too-stupid on the monkey bars.
It takes him nothing to swing up and drag Badou, one armed, with him.
But for now, they are waiting, like seeing animals watching for predators. Red eyes and a green eye, anomalies on the monochrome (as opposed to Technicolor) world of children rolling in sand, which Badou conveniently snaps an image of with his Best Girl making moans of appreciation. Genkaku had never been able to bring himself to be jealousy of the -- hobby? Job. Contraption. He knows those fingers are multi-talented, and so long as they make him moan in something just off of gratitude, he's okay with him cheating on him now and then.
After all, he had already bled like a saint into his Black Hole, even as they had ditched paying the time cards and spilled chemicals instead. It seemed like equivalent exchange, and they are both such progenitors and rioters of The Impulses.
And just Pulses, really, which is what Impulse is telling Genkaku to seek out. His jutting jaw finally goes right-side-up when he tilts his head up, all the blood centered on his brain (and mind) leaving his vision a little eccentric as the rush goes back down. He observes catacomb strips of flesh between burning strands of orange, the difference between cold pallor and warm color, and it's really just light-years apart despite being so intimate, so close (so transfixing).
Badou's attention is pulled away from the proper shutterspeedexposure settings when he feels even more exposed than the silver print of EX on the side of the boxwork. He feels breath, hot and heavy, exhaled through nostrils and ruffling his hair, pushing both heat and cold down his spine. The man's center closes in on him, the hollow of a sternum pressing into the knobs of his spine like lock and key -- and they fit.
He gives a murmur of amusement, and returns to his work.
And maybe that's the confirmation (specifically: lack thereof) Genkaku really needs, because his exhaling nose nudges apart the curtains of orange to expose the vulnerability of the nape of his neck. His so fucking pale neck, looking two shades off of "sallow" and just into a hue of "sickly", and knowing that normally gives him a pulse (haha) in tight leather confines, but there is nothing this time.
Just arms wrapping, belonging, crooks of elbowsforearms sliding into the perfect dishes between ribs and hips on the slouch, hands wrapping upwardly on the down side of his chest. The lack of encouragement only makes him want to give reassurance more, lips loose and smooth down the little arcs of bones, where he seeks his fortune and requests his poverty.
Badou exhales, says nothing, keeps his eye locked on the camera (and he realizes suddenly, plainly, that all his most important things are blacker than night). For a snake, he emanates so much heat that it pours right off of his body and into the Undergrounder's bones, gnawing away at all the cancer inside and replacing it with his own anathema.
The brush is simplequick as it trails down and away to the beginning of his shoulder, chin tucked inside the white fuzz of the coat, overcoming so many obstacles for just a simple brush and somehow -- somehow -- Badou is touched by the dedication.
He knows he has his eyes closed. In the same way that he knows it's time to set the camera down and close his own eyes (even locking that one inside the black matte vault down tighter), breathe and listen and feel and understand. Despite the heaviness of the ugly coat, he can feel the inquiry of prayer beads along his sharpshooter shoulderblades, and maybe if his blood could turn and attack the monk, there would be nothing he could do about it in such close proximity, no Branches Of Sins for Stupid Wise Birds to be sitting on that night.
Moments Like These. They are what he's always reached for (in his own numb-fingered away), believing it truer than Hallmark Card's cheap, shitty poetry -- and how neither one of them would ever come just the same. Moments Like These, where he can simply breathe and coexist with another human being, where no radiowaves interrupt his frequency and he can just ...
just be. A person instead of a memory, a troublemaker instead of a nothing. (Nothing is not Safe during the day -- Nothing during the day gets you killed.)
... He hears they've got Hallmark Cards that sing now, though. And he thinks (wants, distantly, like Surface illusions of rain) of the Flying V and Genkaku's rough, blistering voice.
The air feels too cold as it enters his lungs, and he realizes with a lethargic delay that he's trying to smoke down a filter and god, that really tastes like shit. The haze between toxic veneer and harmless (safe) lethargy becomes a grapplegrab for control. The demon behind him moving at all reminds him of his own internal monster and its with a (disapproving) jerktwitch that he throws the filter onto the playground.
The monk would oblige silently if he weren't too enwrapped in the jut of his collarbone, leaning over his shoulder like a real livewire, like a couldn't-give-a-fuck renegade.
It's only when Badou gaspgaspgasps that the press of leather on his back comes closer arm goes under arm to tug his chin towards him. He exhales smoke and poison and ash into his black little lungs, parting his lips in a deepsweet kiss, tongue seeming almost chaste (and young, the tip of it not quite filter-licked rough) as it brushes the inside of his bottom lip.
For some reason, he suddenly feels too hot. The hue on his cheeks is awkward and wrong, and if Genkaku had opened his eyes by that point, there probably would have been a snide comment on it. But for now, there is only the way Badou is awkwardly, clumsy turned in his grip, camera off-kilter on his thighs (the devotee that is the more jealous of the two), neck craned too far as he inhalesinhaleschugs down the deep, dark necessityindulgence from his snake's slinking tongue.
He thinks back on come-slicked fingers and how he had to dig out the infection. He's not sure he can do it this time; not for his esophagus. This is an entirely different fever Genkaku has fucked into him.
When the inevitable break comes, he is panting, harshhardquick, and his eye snaps open to look at the monk, too fucking overwhelmed (is this what it's like to overflow?).
And the older's eyes are still closed. He knows, he knows, how does he always fucking know?! He can't look because he'll steal this moment, these emotions from Badou, this quiet little epiphany (of I love you fuck I love you but I don't wanna fuckin' love you) that is not heralded by music from above or hellthreatened rumbling from below, but just ...
exists as an instance, an anomaly in time.
"Open your fuckin' eyes. You ain't blind," he snaps quick, and somehow (instinctively?) Genkaku's thighs traplock down his guns against his hips.
"I will be someday," comes the smoothness, gritty from desire and need, stirring both their beasts.
"'Coz you'll be dead then."
"'Cuz I already am."
Badou wants to snarl, wants the scream at him, but there's nothing he can say that would ...
He thinks of the Albatross, of Genkaku's wetrough tongue against his exposed eye, of fox vulnerability, and he feels Carnage and Rage (three letter's difference why is it always fucking three) bubble up inside of him, the melting pot of where his calloused and burnfucked hands originate.
The monk's large hand claps down on his shoulder, grounds him suddenly from flyingflyingsoaring away on his chemicals (never emotions). He closes the distance, pulls him close again, and the kiss is more forceful than before, more demanding and reality-snapping, a reassurance and a promise and a lie and too much truth and the fluxwaxwane of emotions dancing on his reverie. There's a grip in clothing somewhere, a delirious need for more foundation, because both of them swear they're gonna be pulled away and only the chains of now and here could hold them down.
Again Badou is shivering, and again Genkaku is restless. But the monk is the one to break the kiss, eyes finally fluttering open in a deeper crimson than they usually are, all underbelly softness and Tilaka-less nostalgia.
"C'mon," the monk sighs out as he grabs a scarred hand (in his own, no longer unloved hand). "Let's go home."
There is compliance somewhere, because he takes up his camera like they're going on another adventure and Genkaku follows with his Prayer Beads like he's already seen this one, and then the Undergrounder stops him suddenly with a hand on his chest, Stop Sign Red.
"Wait."
"Waitin'."
"Shut up, asshole." Spat, too soon, quicker than he meant to and not getting the syllables just quite right (maybe it was in French): "You ain't dead."
Something indescribable and ... foreign dances like match-lights on the monk's face. Something between thank you and you're wrong.
"Tell me. Right now, or--"
"I know," the monk interrupts. Says it once, twice. And it's not assurance for his Lover this time, but for himself. I know I know I know, so why can't I say it? The past feels too heavy, too shackled to his spine, making his shoulders ache with how much he holds them up (the kind of ache he revels in).
It isn't softness that breaks on his face, but a sort of desperation. You don't care, you can't care, so why do you always ...
"You make me real."
It is all he has, and it leaves a sundering rift of shrapnel splitting across his chest, the same corners Badou feels scraping at the insides of his ribs.
He's not sure if it's good enough, but the dream he's beginning to see when he closes his eyes at night, at first just a white moving dot in the center of his visionconsciousness, is finally beginning to blossom into a real-life gun that can be felt: trigger and all. He's never taken so much sympathy on anyone as he has a fucking snake. Not even a snake anymore, really. Just the snakeskin, a shell of what he used to be. (You've come a long way, so stay on your feet, Super Monk.)
"Okay."
Okay.
"Let's go make love."
WHAT THE HELL IT'S LIKE THREE THOUSAND WORDS I DON'T EVEN.
oh my god rabid fuck you for being a constant inspiration YOU ARE GOING TO DRAIN ME DRY YOU FUCKING INCUBUS.
(it'll be like the best creative orgasm i ever had.)
There are three places in the world Badou feels safe.
The first is likely the most glaringly obvious to those who get close to him. It is a place of both recompense and business, a place of black corners that are better taken care of than his gun, no dirt and grime in her mechanisms. She's got a pretty, glass (breakable) face on top of that boxy black body, and his fingers rake down her form with every meaning of discovering worlds through her, inside her. The things she shows him ...
She is his first lover, if only out of necessity (the way killing has become second-nature, as are his fingers on her buttons, ticking and tweaking and turning her just right).
The shutter clicks and whirrs.
He is safe behind his camera, he is safe digging up the muddy secrets of Thor because there is no Below here; there are no Dirty Dreams or Sicilian Mobs to drag him down to underworlds. (No, there are only Sicilian Snakes that aren't actually from Sicily.)
The second is not so obvious but not so intimate. Few have ever seen him sleep, even fewer willingly (because of the exact thing he numbers off as things come in threes in his head). Sure, he can pass out anywhere, in any position, in any particular mood (other than tripwiretrapinsane, obviously), but he has to feel ...
well.
Safe.
And once he is asleep, he is safe, because his brain no longer registers danger. Nightmares do not plague him. Deceitful dreams do not beckon him. His heart rate drops even more, the parted rasp of his dry lips descends, and he falls into worlds of undeveloped and/or overexposed film. No film negatives spinning backwards, no ancient old memories with their dirty sepia corners, no worlds of too much noise like gunfire or party noisemakers or his own psychotic laughter as he paints walls red.
No nothing. And Nothing is Safe.
The last ... is not a conscious decision. It's not even truth. It is a lie his mind has lulled his body into believing, like a manipulated photograph for that slap-it-tap-it worthy chick to have nice tits and a nice face. It is the mentality of trust (a sharp, horrible thing that he feels like corners raking at the ivory insides of his ribcage) cloaked in his junkyard-items body (fencepost hips and letteropener teeth, skeletonkey fingers and jailbars-for-arms) in the guise of slumber. It is the way he can close his eyes and dream without sleeping, the way he can imagine and pretend in waking hours, the way a snake's daydreams are more enchanting than a Wise Bird's morning call for early worms. Technicolor had seemed overrated since the Wizard of Oz days.
It is in the crackle of electricity that passes along rotting barb-wire thorns and goes straight into salvation-propaganda motes, pulling down guitar neck drawbridges to send real shock value!! into the safety(-hazard)'s castle of corpses.
Playing with fire is not wise nor safe, but if you've got an inferno on your side, you will never fear hell.
"Ya lost in thought again, yeah?" says the (Third Safety) suihomocidist from behind him, and it makes the his one-eyed gaze go starksharp to the leather-clad limbs on either side of his own lap. His own too-long legs are hitched off the bench, crossed at the ankles, ass barely slid into the bench between the two more encompassing (snakes shouldn't have legs!), with his First Safety in three large pieces on his lap. (His Second Safety is a beguiling call, as dawn has [been] broken and little alien children are skittering or slithering into a nearby school, which is a signal for them both to crawl back into nest havens and snake pits.)
"Shuddup," he snaps as two pieces of the camera click back together and the focus of the lens adjusts, pauses, adjusts, and gives an agreeable humclickclick (approval of her master's erotic fingers). The only response from his real lover (the one of flesh and bone) is an ashen chuckle.
He can feel the way the man moves, the bottom of his belly brushing the slack of his ugly green coat and making them tremble with his laughter. It is picturesque in his mind how his arms are thrown carelessly over the backs of the simple bench in the slums, smoke rolling thoughtlessly, the tensionenergy of his knee right beside him bouncing on the arc of his boot. One leg tucked, one leg out, two silent proclamations of this is mine and this is not yours.
Badou twitchily smacks the vibrating limb with the back of a scarred hand, earning another filament-shifting chuckle. "What it do, Super Monk?" is the drawl. "Y'seem itchy."
"Yeah, well, f'I am, it's 'cuz'a you. Grab a disease from a toilet seat, Fox?"
"You sittin' at my back right now, ain't ya?" It's not a harsh inquiry in the least, and it's not more like a statement, but Genkaku can feel it's hidden meanings by the way the cameralover snaps closed.
He's asking about regret.
"Nah. I'm a smoker."
Badou smiles but doesn't flash it over his shoulder, instead exhales (not smoke but steam from breath in colder air, and who knew he was warm enough inside to actually make it?). It's enough. His shoulders slack down as a humanoid kid runs late to class with his backpack jolted and clinging to one arm.
They are waiting. Waiting for the MudKids to return to their societies and for their sloppy pies to harden into dirt that will get smeared into wounds on knuckles or bittengritted between teeth. It's one of the monk's favorite getaways, those times he's just Too Tired To Sleep, when Badou can hang back and admire the way his clothes lax and stretch differently when he's too-big too-stupid on the monkey bars.
It takes him nothing to swing up and drag Badou, one armed, with him.
But for now, they are waiting, like seeing animals watching for predators. Red eyes and a green eye, anomalies on the monochrome (as opposed to Technicolor) world of children rolling in sand, which Badou conveniently snaps an image of with his Best Girl making moans of appreciation. Genkaku had never been able to bring himself to be jealousy of the -- hobby? Job. Contraption. He knows those fingers are multi-talented, and so long as they make him moan in something just off of gratitude, he's okay with him cheating on him now and then.
After all, he had already bled like a saint into his Black Hole, even as they had ditched paying the time cards and spilled chemicals instead. It seemed like equivalent exchange, and they are both such progenitors and rioters of The Impulses.
And just Pulses, really, which is what Impulse is telling Genkaku to seek out. His jutting jaw finally goes right-side-up when he tilts his head up, all the blood centered on his brain (and mind) leaving his vision a little eccentric as the rush goes back down. He observes catacomb strips of flesh between burning strands of orange, the difference between cold pallor and warm color, and it's really just light-years apart despite being so intimate, so close (so transfixing).
Badou's attention is pulled away from the proper shutterspeedexposure settings when he feels even more exposed than the silver print of EX on the side of the boxwork. He feels breath, hot and heavy, exhaled through nostrils and ruffling his hair, pushing both heat and cold down his spine. The man's center closes in on him, the hollow of a sternum pressing into the knobs of his spine like lock and key -- and they fit.
He gives a murmur of amusement, and returns to his work.
And maybe that's the confirmation (specifically: lack thereof) Genkaku really needs, because his exhaling nose nudges apart the curtains of orange to expose the vulnerability of the nape of his neck. His so fucking pale neck, looking two shades off of "sallow" and just into a hue of "sickly", and knowing that normally gives him a pulse (haha) in tight leather confines, but there is nothing this time.
Just arms wrapping, belonging, crooks of elbowsforearms sliding into the perfect dishes between ribs and hips on the slouch, hands wrapping upwardly on the down side of his chest. The lack of encouragement only makes him want to give reassurance more, lips loose and smooth down the little arcs of bones, where he seeks his fortune and requests his poverty.
Badou exhales, says nothing, keeps his eye locked on the camera (and he realizes suddenly, plainly, that all his most important things are blacker than night). For a snake, he emanates so much heat that it pours right off of his body and into the Undergrounder's bones, gnawing away at all the cancer inside and replacing it with his own anathema.
The brush is simplequick as it trails down and away to the beginning of his shoulder, chin tucked inside the white fuzz of the coat, overcoming so many obstacles for just a simple brush and somehow -- somehow -- Badou is touched by the dedication.
He knows he has his eyes closed. In the same way that he knows it's time to set the camera down and close his own eyes (even locking that one inside the black matte vault down tighter), breathe and listen and feel and understand. Despite the heaviness of the ugly coat, he can feel the inquiry of prayer beads along his sharpshooter shoulderblades, and maybe if his blood could turn and attack the monk, there would be nothing he could do about it in such close proximity, no Branches Of Sins for Stupid Wise Birds to be sitting on that night.
Moments Like These. They are what he's always reached for (in his own numb-fingered away), believing it truer than Hallmark Card's cheap, shitty poetry -- and how neither one of them would ever come just the same. Moments Like These, where he can simply breathe and coexist with another human being, where no radiowaves interrupt his frequency and he can just ...
just be. A person instead of a memory, a troublemaker instead of a nothing. (Nothing is not Safe during the day -- Nothing during the day gets you killed.)
... He hears they've got Hallmark Cards that sing now, though. And he thinks (wants, distantly, like Surface illusions of rain) of the Flying V and Genkaku's rough, blistering voice.
The air feels too cold as it enters his lungs, and he realizes with a lethargic delay that he's trying to smoke down a filter and god, that really tastes like shit. The haze between toxic veneer and harmless (safe) lethargy becomes a grapplegrab for control. The demon behind him moving at all reminds him of his own internal monster and its with a (disapproving) jerktwitch that he throws the filter onto the playground.
The monk would oblige silently if he weren't too enwrapped in the jut of his collarbone, leaning over his shoulder like a real livewire, like a couldn't-give-a-fuck renegade.
It's only when Badou gaspgaspgasps that the press of leather on his back comes closer arm goes under arm to tug his chin towards him. He exhales smoke and poison and ash into his black little lungs, parting his lips in a deepsweet kiss, tongue seeming almost chaste (and young, the tip of it not quite filter-licked rough) as it brushes the inside of his bottom lip.
For some reason, he suddenly feels too hot. The hue on his cheeks is awkward and wrong, and if Genkaku had opened his eyes by that point, there probably would have been a snide comment on it. But for now, there is only the way Badou is awkwardly, clumsy turned in his grip, camera off-kilter on his thighs (the devotee that is the more jealous of the two), neck craned too far as he inhalesinhaleschugs down the deep, dark necessityindulgence from his snake's slinking tongue.
He thinks back on come-slicked fingers and how he had to dig out the infection. He's not sure he can do it this time; not for his esophagus. This is an entirely different fever Genkaku has fucked into him.
When the inevitable break comes, he is panting, harshhardquick, and his eye snaps open to look at the monk, too fucking overwhelmed (is this what it's like to overflow?).
And the older's eyes are still closed. He knows, he knows, how does he always fucking know?! He can't look because he'll steal this moment, these emotions from Badou, this quiet little epiphany (of I love you fuck I love you but I don't wanna fuckin' love you) that is not heralded by music from above or hellthreatened rumbling from below, but just ...
exists as an instance, an anomaly in time.
"Open your fuckin' eyes. You ain't blind," he snaps quick, and somehow (instinctively?) Genkaku's thighs traplock down his guns against his hips.
"I will be someday," comes the smoothness, gritty from desire and need, stirring both their beasts.
"'Coz you'll be dead then."
"'Cuz I already am."
Badou wants to snarl, wants the scream at him, but there's nothing he can say that would ...
He thinks of the Albatross, of Genkaku's wetrough tongue against his exposed eye, of fox vulnerability, and he feels Carnage and Rage (three letter's difference why is it always fucking three) bubble up inside of him, the melting pot of where his calloused and burnfucked hands originate.
The monk's large hand claps down on his shoulder, grounds him suddenly from flyingflyingsoaring away on his chemicals (never emotions). He closes the distance, pulls him close again, and the kiss is more forceful than before, more demanding and reality-snapping, a reassurance and a promise and a lie and too much truth and the fluxwaxwane of emotions dancing on his reverie. There's a grip in clothing somewhere, a delirious need for more foundation, because both of them swear they're gonna be pulled away and only the chains of now and here could hold them down.
Again Badou is shivering, and again Genkaku is restless. But the monk is the one to break the kiss, eyes finally fluttering open in a deeper crimson than they usually are, all underbelly softness and Tilaka-less nostalgia.
"C'mon," the monk sighs out as he grabs a scarred hand (in his own, no longer unloved hand). "Let's go home."
There is compliance somewhere, because he takes up his camera like they're going on another adventure and Genkaku follows with his Prayer Beads like he's already seen this one, and then the Undergrounder stops him suddenly with a hand on his chest, Stop Sign Red.
"Wait."
"Waitin'."
"Shut up, asshole." Spat, too soon, quicker than he meant to and not getting the syllables just quite right (maybe it was in French): "You ain't dead."
Something indescribable and ... foreign dances like match-lights on the monk's face. Something between thank you and you're wrong.
"Tell me. Right now, or--"
"I know," the monk interrupts. Says it once, twice. And it's not assurance for his Lover this time, but for himself. I know I know I know, so why can't I say it? The past feels too heavy, too shackled to his spine, making his shoulders ache with how much he holds them up (the kind of ache he revels in).
It isn't softness that breaks on his face, but a sort of desperation. You don't care, you can't care, so why do you always ...
"You make me real."
It is all he has, and it leaves a sundering rift of shrapnel splitting across his chest, the same corners Badou feels scraping at the insides of his ribs.
He's not sure if it's good enough, but the dream he's beginning to see when he closes his eyes at night, at first just a white moving dot in the center of his visionconsciousness, is finally beginning to blossom into a real-life gun that can be felt: trigger and all. He's never taken so much sympathy on anyone as he has a fucking snake. Not even a snake anymore, really. Just the snakeskin, a shell of what he used to be. (You've come a long way, so stay on your feet, Super Monk.)
"Okay."
Okay.
"Let's go make love."