Tokyo Babylon (or X/1999), Seishirou/Subaru, vines as tentacles, abrading violation. "Reoccurence" Reoccurence post-Tokyo Babylon
It's just like Subaru remembers. It should be a nightmare, the kind where everything happens exactly the same and he can't change anything, no matter what he tries.
He doesn't try.
The tree, the hunger and abomination of it, clawing its way out of the ground behind him, a soundless twist of roots and vines. The fall of the petals, speeding with his heartbeat.
"People betray people," he hears Seishirou say, an echo, soft. "These things --"
The roots wind around his ankles, jerk him backward. Vines catch at his wrists, wind around his arms. He's off the ground, held up -- the roots circling around his legs, higher --
"--they happen all over this city."
Subaru makes a noise, or tries to, starts to, and then one of the vines is in his mouth, as fast and abrupt as illusion, and he gasps.
His mouth is open, stretched and splayed like his legs, the rough bark scraping the inside of his lips raw, shoving his tongue flat in his lower jaw and pushing up against his palate. He gags, sobs for breath he can't reach around the thickness of the vine. His tongue flexes against it, squirming helplessly.
The scent of sakura is heavy enough to have turned into a taste.
The vines around Subaru's wrists jerk tight, draw his hands up behind his back, all of his weight hanging from shoulders and wrists. They pull harder, and the low buzzing strain in his muscles snaps into real pain, white and -- expanding -- in his wrist, in his scars -- the moan he can't help is swallowed by the suffocating wood. He twists. He's strung up. The movement goes only as far as a futile skirl of his hips in the air, no friction, only the spiraling vines holding him up, holding him open. His back scrapes against the bark of the tree. There's no give, even when it opens, sucking, devouring -- just more abrasion, more of him rubbed raw, like he's being flayed, like there won't be anything left of him.
Everything aches, throat and jaw stretched, hip joints strained, his chest tight like he wants to cry or cry out, groin --
Subaru forces his eyes open, tries to see through the blood-pink fall of petals, through the blood-black spots in his vision, thinks, dreams -- oxygen deprivation -- just the edges of the smile under the dead eye, watching, just exactly the same as he always was --
The vine in his mouth surges forward and the vines on his thighs push -- push in -- a thorn catches on his lip, tears, his mouth full of blood and there really is no air, only movement, inside him and against his back, the scrape --
He's covered in sweat, tangled in the thin sheets of his bed, shaking and hard and alone, with his lip bitten clean through.
The flare of the scars on his hands fades while he watches. When it's gone he turns his head to the wall, stares at the white, bare paint.