by Princess of Pain

~NOTE: As with its prequel, this fic deals with the subject of cutting. I have attempted to deal with this topic with as much sensitivity and realism as I possibly could. This is not an endorsement of cutting and should not be taken as such.~

As a child, Gonou always preferred the libraries of the church-orphanage to the company of the other children. There was so much more there for him to love, and best of all, there were usually no other souls there--no one who would bother his reading. The other kids his age loved the gold of the sunlight reflecting in strips and bangles off the nearby lake; he loved the soft flickering of an oil-lamp's orange flame. The others were all for grass-stained knees, sweets melting into lumps of gooey sugar in their pockets, the smell of the heat cooking all the earth into hard, dead clay. He was for the rustling of dry pages and crackling binding, the smell of dust that had not been disturbed since before he was born, and the slick black words, streaming endlessly over thick yellow parchment-paper.

And when he was a child, Gonou had always best loved the horror stories. The darker, the better. Oh, the nuns hated having them around, but the stories they had were classics, and if there was one thing that the worshippers of the Virgin hated more than anything, it was destroying something old. The Virgin Goddess was all in favor of keeping everything and everyone old and dusky, after all. Of these stories, his utter favorite--the one that he remembered most clearly as a man--was the story of a man being tortured by a nightmare version of the Virgin-worshippers (who he mentally referred to, even at the age of six, as "that stupid cult"). The man was bound up and tied to the bottom of a pit. A gigantic pendulum was suspended over the pit, and attached to the pendulum, a razor-sharp blade. Though it had been years since he'd read the story, Hakkai still remembered Gonou's delighted terror at reading of the man's panic and impending madness, as the blade swung ever lower, creeping like a tear running down an invisible face.

And though it had frightened him, he did not know that, years later, he would reach a bit of an understanding as to how the narrator might have felt.

"I made those", that was what Gojyo had said, before shutting Gonou out for the first time in their forced companionship, and for the last time in their longer, more willful friendship. "I made those", and Gonou's eyes--just as green and dark and stormy as the soul of the man who bore them--had widened, as if they were straining under the shock that had flooded his senses. "I made those," and the devil's ladder of short, blunt scars and circular bullet-burns took on more meaning than the newly-made youkai had ever wanted them to have.

It had been over a year since that moment, the one that remained carved in his memory like an etching in the lumps and whorls of his forebrain. It had not taken long for Gonou--and after he died, Hakkai--to obsess over them. Whenever he lay awake on raining nights, those times when everything that his dead self had done in his last few days of life felt like it had happened that morning--he only thought of blood. But, when the night was clear and the moon looked blindly down onto the world like the cataract-filmed eye of a corpse, his mind would lightly turn to thoughts of scars.

Hakkai, in his wide and sundry readings, had come to gain a modest grip on the ideal of evolution. His understanding of it clashed with those short little pink-ribbon scars on Gojyo's ankles. Causing pain to oneself did not make sense. Cutting, bleeding, dying a small death--that did not gel with his logical understandings of the urges and needs of the human animal. As Hakkai, he hated having to deal with anything that could not be dealt with in the echoes of logic. Cause and effect. Bleeding causes sickness and dying. Cutting causes pain and death (did he not know this from experience, know from feeling his own blade witching through the air like an evil and enchanted thing to busy itself with a meal of flesh and gore?). Therefore, it was incompatible with living.

With Gojyo around, though, Hakkai knew that the obsessively logical portion of his brain was useless. Gojyo did not function in the bounds of something so crude as causality. His entire life was a non sequitur. A hanyo living to the ripe old age of twenty? A hanyo of the age of eight, somehow finding a way to survive out of trash-cans and cardboard boxes? A child learning how to smoke at the age of five, having to hear the things that Gojyo heard every single night, drifting through the walls of the room his mother slept in, the room that Jien visited with her before creeping off to cry himself to sleep? These were things that did not jibe with Hakkai's suffocatingly scientific views on the world and how it functioned, all the laws that dictated how people should act. Hakkai's thoughts and feelings meant nothing in the face of Sha Gojyo, who never failed to make him feel twisted and inverted and strange. And more than a little useless.

All right then; no logic. Though it seemed impossible to him, Hakkai only began to reach towards the thin wires of thought that were strung between a Gojyo who cowered before the claws of his mother and a Gojyo who cowered before the harpies he took to bed--Hakkai only ever laid hands on those wires, felt their viscous nature and noted the rusted, flaked blood that tainted their surfaces, when he himself refused to think as Hakkai thought.

Gojyo hurt. When Gojyo was hurt by the outside, the wounds were too deep to get at. There was no clamp, no tourniquet, no stitch that could hold those cuts together, make them heal, let him move on. And how had a young, childish Gojyo ever hit on a way to make them bleed out? An accident? His "mother" had beaten him, yes, and cut him, yes, and the more that Gojyo let slip about her, the more sure that Hakkai became that she was responsible for most of the faded scars that the hanyo had shown to him fourteen months ago. But the pain that she'd passed on to him had never meant as much as the curses, the whispers of hatred, the sureness with which she told him that he was a waste of flesh. Words were never supposed to hurt, but long after the faces of the scores of men and women and children he'd so lovingly acted upon were nothing but faded circles in his mind, the only thing that Hakkai remembered with stark clarity from that night was Kanan's whispered "... i'm sorry, gonou..."

Words, he knew, were daggers.

So she beat him, and chanted her vile hatred of him, like a crazed shaman working to exorcise a particularly stubborn demon by whipping it out of its host. And the real hurts she left were the ones that Gojyo could never get at, unless he cut them out of himself. Draw them out. The way that one must perform surgery in order to excise hooks of shrapnel from the skin. The cut was made, the blood was shed, the vitriol of her words spilling forth in a trickle of crimson, the only color that ever mattered to the hanyo. An eviscerated sort of healing, the sort that coyotes practice when their feet are caught in traps.

He could smell the blood, feel his skin split, and know that he was better than the pain, and know that it would heal and he would be triumphant. Even the scar would fade, one day, although Gojyo did not seem interested in such a thing happening, in spite of his efforts to hide them. He did not want anyone to see--not because he was ashamed of them, but because they were his marks, his pain, for him to face. And no one else.

Hakkai might have thought of what it meant--that Gojyo had permitted him, if only for a moment, into a part of the hanyo's life that only two other people had ever known--but whenever he tried, he fetched up against that queer twisting feeling in his heart, and never went further. He was always stopping just short of paths of that nature. If he sensed that the wires of his thoughts were straining towards a place that might be light, that might give hope--he let them go, and turned back to the rust.

And now?

The pendulum.

The razor was just a little something he'd bought earlier that day. Gojyo was always giving him some of his poker money, especially when the children that Hakkai had taken to tutoring had to stop their classes in order to work their parents' fields. It was an old-fashioned blade, the sort that rested in its handle and flipped out when it was needed--a straight-razor, he thought it was called. The handle was black plastic, and although he'd been cradling it in his hand for almost an hour, it still felt like a bit of rotten ice.

Cho Hakkai, when he thought about it, could feel his pulse beating up against the edge of the razor. He was not holding the razor in a deadly place--it rested against the side of his ankle--but it still rested on a bed of nerves and veins, glass bones and creaking tendons, and it was threatening to interrupt the tide of life that continued to flow, in spite of everything that he had ever done to stop it. Unlike its handle, the blade was growing warm against his skin, as it sucked out his body's heat like a vampire. It was an ugly, wicked thing that had sent a shiver of revulsion up his arm when he'd picked it up at the market. That was why he had selected it. He could have broken open one of Gojyo's safety razors, but his roommate would have noticed. And, unlike Gojyo, Hakkai knew that he was going to feel humiliated by his scars later, the way he never failed to be guiltridden when he thought of the rippling, tough scar that weighted down his stomach until he sometimes felt like it would press all the air and life out of him.

The razor's edge had not moved since Gojyo had left to go to whatever dark, smoky pit he'd decided to drink in that night. The longer that Hakkai held it to his skin, the more he was feeling overwhelmed by something that he'd not believed would occur. In the 604,800 minutes that now separated him from those three words ("I made those."), the idea of just one little cut, one hole that would bleed the poison of his soul out of his body--it had snowballed and gained a horrid, fascinating appeal, one that he had finally found himself unable to deny. There was the ideal of the murderous satin of the razor, the dull red of the blood... and a little bit of pain sucked dry and thrown away. This ideal was clashing with the freezing reality of the plastic handle, of the liquid warmth of the thing that was promising to split his pale skin apart. Now that he was here, now that it was almost too late to stop and pull back and call it all a fit--something was happening that he had not expected.

He was scared to feel the pain. And why not? Had not everything that had happened to him a year ago made up his entire life? Was that not everything that Hakkai was? Would there be anything left of him if he did not feel hurt anymore? Hakkai's identity was based in the final few actions of Gonou, in the short and violent ending of his sisterlover's life. He would have nothing else if he did not have his pain. Would he?

Hakkai thought of the hanyo, felt that disfigured urge that pinned him to Gojyo like a series of thick, small red stitches. Pinned ("You dead?") and bound ("I thought I saw you smile.") and lost ("I made those.") in the shadowy places where Gojyo stored his devils, the pain that Gojyo fought so fucking hard to ignore and dismiss and belittle in the face of Hakkai's tormented need. There was that. If he felt no more pain, he could give something other than his anguish to Gojyo--he could make himself something worthwhile, something worth keeping around.

He thought, so resolved, and when he moved to unbind his skin, the door opened.

~TBC~