* Tokyo Babylon - X/1999, Seishirou/Subaru, in front of a mirror -- "Creases" Creases tokyo babylon / x/1999 Mithrigil Galtirglin
1999.10.27 23:59
He bought the full-length mirror at Isetan years ago, he’s forgotten how many. Of all the things Subaru never thought he’d see in it, Seishirou was at the top of the list.
Imitations of him, yes—ghosts, Subaru thought once, vestiges, the elements of the man that he accrued into himself. Those he knew, those he expected—those, he put there, he changed himself and fate filled in the rest and chiseled him into the shape of his enemy—not opposite, reflection.
But things he never thought he’d see—the man himself, on Subaru’s side of this mirror, and his reflection’s reflection, overwhelming his own. Broad and strong where Subaru isn’t, white where Subaru’s black—real where Subaru is illusion and illusion where Subaru still pretends he’s alive—his dead eye proud and unbandaged where Subaru’s is hibernating and healing in a parody of shame, not for the loss itself but for the manner of it—but the hand that’s sliding up his throat and his mirror image’s are both close enough for him to touch. Or maybe that’s just the lack of depth perception.
His heart’s not the inverse of Subaru’s, no matter what he said all those years ago.
They overlap their reflections—Subaru’s hands press to the cold absence of his own, palm smearing and spreading but touching nothing. He stares paralyzed as Seishirou’s hands push in, as he leans over Subaru’s shoulder to stifle the glow of Subaru’s scars with his mouth, his chin. The reflection’s eye is open, smirking, sharp over the matte of Subaru’s sweater, and Subaru watches his own acknowledge this, watches the veins in his neck shiver and raise.
Seishirou doesn’t have to tell him to keep his eye open. The command thickens the air around them, like the beginning of the end.
So it’s with his eye on himself, on them, on inversion that Subaru reaches over his shoulder and loosens Seishirou’s tie, uproots the collar and fumbles at the button. Seishirou laughs against the back of Subaru’s hand, into the pentagram—the shiver that pelts through him is so pronounced, with his body framed in black. Subaru grabs the cloth, the damp skin under it, runs his knuckles up the bulge in Seishirou’s throat and wonders if he can make the reflection shift and shiver just like him. It doesn’t. But he watches and he tries. He sees Seishirou’s knuckles tighten, on Subaru’s reflection’s neck and waist—he feels it backward, distant and dizzy and out of his skin.
Even the clock has a reflection but he doesn’t follow that, doesn’t know how much time passes like this, parting layers and stepping out of colors, out of blacks and whites. When he braces himself on the mirror with his elbow, Seishirou’s chin curled in the hollow of his throat, their skin blends together and swallows the shadows and creases, flushed the same red. The hands on his flesh are and aren’t his own, touching the way he is and isn’t telling them to, doing everything he does and doesn’t want. Only the white bandages over his eye and the flaring scars on his hands define him—and even those mark him as something not himself.
His reflection’s half-face contorts with pain when Seishirou frames him, spreads him, pushes in. The bandages darken with sweat, his own, Seishirou’s smearing from flushed fingertips. They slide into Subaru’s mouth, knuckle-deep—it looks awkward, indulgent, when the rough of his tongue slips through them and if Subaru startles it’s lost in the wash of agony, of finally knowing the distance between them.