Fic: Skimming the Eyewall (Torchwood/Yami no Matsuei, NC-17, Tatsumi/Ianto)
Title: Skimming the Eyewall
Fandom: Torchwood/Yami no Matsuei
Characters: Ianto/Tatsumi (references to all TW characters and Tsuzuki)
Rating: NC-17
Timeline: post S1 for TW-aka The Year That Never Was (I call it, 'HOLY SHIT-- APOCALYPSE.') Spoilers for all that stuff, including the DW eps. YnM-no timeline. Just some time.
Summary: Now you are beginning to think that things in Japan never happen to you by accident, though truly, you'd like to think that even though your contact had fallen through, this had been more coincidence and less part of some cosmological design. Even though your host has not been shy about the fact that he is an Angel of Death. An accountant and financial manager, but still. Angel. Of. Death.
The stadium effect is a phenomenon observed in strong tropical cyclones. It is a fairly common event, where the clouds of the eyewall curve outward from the surface with height.*
***
The path leading to Tatsumi's front door is so covered with cherry blossoms that it feels as if you're walking on a carpet. The sound is muted everywhere, as if Tatsumi even charges the birds to sing.
When you get back from the small local still-functioning-but-barely market, cubes of tofu floating merrily in your bucket of water, Tatsumi has returned from the Ministry and is sitting in his kitchen, sipping tea and looking over a stack of papers. Shoes discarded at the door, you set the bucket aside, in the cooler that is so ancient it is just a wooden box with a brick of ice inside, and wash your hands at the tap. A porcelain teacup as it is set down on its saucer is the only sound aside from the splashing water.
The cloth hanging from the hook next to the cupboard is already damp when you run your hands over it, and for a moment you stop to think about how this is as close to your host as you have been since arriving. Tatsumi is distant and allowing, as if he has gathered you up from destruction and is now examining you from a distance to see if you are indeed what he had bargained on.
Even now, as you lean against the counter, hands on the grain and the porcelain rim of the sink, you let your gaze slide outside, to the trees shaking off petals, the frantic bend of branches as the birds leap from limb to limb. The sunset is an angry red swath dragged through blue, something you might have once considered more romantic, more picturesque, if you aren't also terrified to see the occasional black streak on the sky, too slow to be a meteor, to big to be a bird, too deadly to be ignored; when they roll along the horizon, clusters of dark balloons bobbing and whizzing, your heart skips a few beats.
'They can't see you,' Tatsumi says from behind him. 'They're looking, but they can't see us at all.'
You nod, but you keep waiting, waiting until they disappear across the sky, as if they have dissolved.
It had been most odd, that even as you had never been a traveler, never been further than a few weekends in Paris with mates and once with Lisa, you would find yourself fighting for your life and the lives around you on what feels like the opposite end of the earth. You find everything too small, too foreign and while beautiful, you remark to yourself in your rare moments of down time, still so very far from the rolling greens of home, or even the sweep and industry of Cardiff.
There had been the time in Tibet, Owen cursing like a sailor and swearing revenge on Number 10 for suggesting that they chase monsters away from home, like Brecons all over again, but this time there still hadn't been aliens and they are all (still) thousands of miles from home, which had been Saxon's point all along. The misdirection had been so very stunning and obvious you wonder if the team still hadn't been a little shell-shocked from other events when Gwen and Owen had agreed to it all.
You had had your doubts when Tatsumi had picked you up from the side of the road, bloody and terrified, if you are being honest with yourself. The team had split up after the first sweep of the Toclafane through the Tokyo airport (the whole time you had been there Owen had bitched about the fucking layovers everywhere), and while you had travelled with Tosh as far as Osaka, she had stayed behind while you and a small group of resistance fighters had mounted a stand in Kyoto, and then of course, Kyoto isn't there anymore. Osaka is buried under a mountain of ash and rubble, of course, and the last you had heard of Owen and Gwen, they had been striking for Hong Kong with a vitriolic and swaggering group of Triad members who had, for once, decided that they'd rather point their guns at something worth shooting. You like to imagine Owen in the hedonistic cinema-inspired underworld of the East, lazing about on silk divans, curls of opium smoke around his head. Or Gwen, in a smart cheongsam, kicking the ever-loving shite out of something, but you know their lives, if they have them still at all, are much like yours: more North By Northwest and less Rush Hour II.
(Thinking of films at all reminds you of the last good night you'd ever had with Jack, sitting in the tourist office with a bag of microwave popcorn and watching Stalag 17 on the computer. He had spilled popcorn all over you and the waxed loquacious about the finer points of Betty Grable. You might have even smiled more than usual.)
You'd been wandering around near the coast, outside of Matsue, not sure what to do next and waiting for the contact that Tosh had left you with when he'd come out of the rain, and you hadn't been rather trusting of him when he had picked you up, but he hadn't been military and so most of you had been grateful. Now you are beginning to think that things in Japan never happen to you by accident, though truly, you'd like to think that even though your contact hadn't fallen through, this had been more coincidence and less part of some cosmological design.
Even though your host has not been shy about the fact that he is an Angel of Death. An accountant and financial manager, but still, Angel. Of. Death.
Tatsumi has been kind enough to dress you; he has rooms of closets filled with well-made suits and shirts, things all in a size so perilously close to your own that you had been quite suspicious of them in the first place. But Tatsumi, while a bit larger in the chest than you, is exactly your inseam, which you had known from the moment he had stepped from the car, headlights trapping you between the guard rail and the grill. The cloth is softer than anything you have worn in months, and you had forgot that clothing could be like this, that it could be anything other than filthy denims and heavy long sleeves and camouflage jackets with pockets for your many tools and ammo magazines.
You stare out the window in front of you, trying to isolate one single petal as it descends to the ground, much like how, as a child, you had picked out single snowflakes and tried to follow them from sky to drift; looking back, you can't remember a single time you actually saw one land with any certainty.
Tatsumi pulls his tie out. You had missed the fingers when they loosened the Hanover knot and untucked the string of silk, and it's a bit disappointing. The tie slides out of his collar with a gentle hissing sound, almost too loud in the silence. You vaguely understand that outside it has begun to rain, and the sound of it hitting the roof replaces the movement of Tatsumi's tie against his neck almost seamlessly.
You think about Jack, whom you now know sails chained in the belly of the Valiant, and Tosh and Gwen and Owen, even Martha Jones, who shares your name and is currently hiking across Kyushu, spreading the fine gospel of the Doctor. You think about the lorry parked and waiting for you ten miles away, the lorry you will use to smuggle Miss Jones into Hiroshima, should she ever manage to get onto Honshu itself.
You wonder just what you are waiting for. You wonder if you are being held here, in reserve, like some sort of playing card tucked into a sleeve, perhaps the lone pawn at the corner of the board about whom everyone has forgot.
He doesn't need to speak to you, not often, Tatsumi with his delicate eyewear and long neck. Tatsumi clears his throat and you turn to him, the small of your back coming to rest against the countertop, your hands loose and wanting to dip into your pockets.
Tatsumi hands you the small envelope, and you open it, reading down through the rough translation that he has made in the margins, because of course, no matter how quick a study you are, a few months is not enough to learn a passable Japanese kanji. Additionally, you understand from the lines of the characters that the writer is older, from another time, perhaps, and his language is archaic, not to mention his script, possibly the Japanese version of copperplate. Seeing the width of the long strokes bending into the thin wires of the side swipes to the left and right, there in the paper, makes you want to meet its writer, to look at the face and know that it isn't Jack. But it can't be, it's impossible, and anyway, you are decidedly not maudlin.
Martha is on her way, it says, but she has left Kyushu and will be in Yamaguchi in the next three days. There is a meeting place, and you think of how you will never be able to get the truck to her in time. You will simply have to steal another, which is no hardship; cars and trucks litter the roads like so much human detritus. You sigh and look down at Tatsumi from his seat in front of you. He leans back casually in the chair, arm slung over the back, legs crossed, other elbow resting pointedly on the table and a teacup cradled in his fingers.
"I can get you to Yamaguchi," Tatsumi says, his eyes shifting away from the flowers on the table and settling on you, as if they had drifted casually, as if his regarding you is just a stop in a slow saunter around the room. Incidental.
There is nothing to do but nod and look at the daylilies on the table, somewhat framing his face, a little to the side as if they are bending to kiss his profile. You can sense, intrinsically, what that would be like, from a certain point of view. The thread of the idea is intriguing, not unlike discovering an old line in a new poem.
"Tea?" Tatsumi says quietly, and you shiver as the bass of his voice hits the membrane of your ear drums like a buzzing noise that itches. He rises, moves to the kettle on the stove, which probably heats as quietly as everything else in the room. Noise is money. Isn't time money? It is hard to remember.
He polishes his glasses on a small cloth that is probably designed just for that, some scrap of silk that he saves and keeps pristine and reserved for just such moments. You wonder if he actually needs the glasses. It seems a crime that an Angel of Death would have such a handicap for all eternity. Somewhere, someone (maybe Jack, and yet not Jack himself, not truly) had convinced you that all God's creatures were perfect, or at least God's special creatures.
You move from your perch on the other side of the kitchen, still surprised after a few days that your feet don't make noise on the tatami and then the tiling around the stove.
The waistband of his trousers fishtails out from his spine, a cut made for braces. The hairs on the back of his neck are sharp and smooth; you feel as if you want them to be longer. You want his hair to fall down his shoulders in waves that you can grasp, probably something that you have acquired from Lisa's days of watching Japanese animation on your Saturdays off.
Tatsumi lets you pull his braces down to frame his ass, not turning from the stove. Tatsumi lets you wind your hands around his waist and undo the buttons of his trousers. Tatsumi lets you snake your hand into his undergarments and grab his cock, pulling just a little bit on the softness there, much warmer than the rest of him. Tatsumi lets you press your cock in the curve of his clothed arse.
And when he lifts the pot from the stove and sets it aside to cool on the wooden trivet, he turns to you and you let Tatsumi unbutton your waistcoat, your shirt, one button at a time, meticulously, with both hands, as if the task requires them completely. You let Tatsumi part the shirt like a curtain and run his hands across your chest, starting with the clavicles and down, circling your nipples, and then onto the sternum, his fingers drawing invisible calligraphy on your skin. You let him lower his mouth to yours and kiss you, slow, lazy. It is full of nothing urgent. Just full.
You do not think of Owen and his Eastern gear, Jack riding the winds in the sky, Tosh in the dusty rubble of a skyscraper or Gwen in pigtails and china flats. You don't think of Martha Jones, Miss Martha Jones dodging a hundred deadly musical spheres to get to you, to ride on your back as you take her on the next arc of her journey, of how you are just another part of that trip, another gun to keep her safe, another wing to pull over her.
Instead, Tatsumi divests you of you, or the things that until lately had made you entirely you: jacket, waistcoat, tie. Shirt, undershirt. His hands skim across your flies when you let your mouth wander away from his and instead lap at the hollow of his throat. Your fingers find his braces, wrapping them around and around your hands in taut coils, pulling his groin tight to yours. Tatsumi's hair, longer in front than in the back, it seems, whispers across your face when you raise it to rub his temple against yours. Over his shoulder, you see the cloisonné fish swimming on his discarded cufflinks, safely tucked into a spare dish on the windowsill.
You can feel his smile along your cheek; it is a comforting thing, to feel a smile in the middle of all of this, to feel it flutter along the skin like so much silk just before Tatsumi's lips find first your temple then your earlobe, and finally the hinge of jaw below it, tongue teasing something out of you that Lisa had never discovered, that Jack had yet to divine. Your fingers reluctantly release his braces to splay under his shirt, and you unbutton it in reverse, fingers seeking the buttons under the seams, from the bottom up. Tatsumi leans back into the stove to watch you, those eyes still hooded and slow, though his glasses rest, folded neatly, on the sideboard.
Tatsumi's arms come to rest in turn on your shoulders as you pull off first one sleeve and then the next, the shirt dangling from your fingertips until you hook it on the chair back; undershirt follows with the slide and economy of movement that comes with experience of undressing a man. Tatsumi's eyes spark when you indicate that you wouldn't mind retiring to some place else, your fingers hooked into his undergarments and pulling, one long tug of invitation, two fingers a living question mark as they twist the waistband of his shorts.
The bedsheets are neat and folded into piles on the well-swept floor. The raku is cleared and pristine, and for a second you have trouble imagining yourself sprawled out on it, open, in this strange place, nothing in sight to indicate that you belong here, that you are even here and not dead. It has crossed your mind already that this is so-that you are dead and Tatsumi is keeping your soul here for some reason, instead of sending you on to another place, to the afterlife, which, until a few weeks ago, you hadn't given much thought outside of church on Christmas Eve.
Tatsumi has never said that you are dead. He has never indicated why he had picked you up in the middle of the night, has never done more than feed and clothe you, more than give you chores while he writes ceaseless communications with humans in the resistance on your behalf, his handwriting so mysterious and filled with pictographs that you wish you could read it. You know that whatever Toshiko had intended when she had set up the contact, you will never be able to ask her, and you will be forever curious about how much she had known about the Ministry of Hades.
You stand in the doorway of his room and stare at the bed, hands on the door frame; the rain has ceased and you can hear the bamboo fountain in the atrium topple down and back up with a hollow knocking sound, a woodpecker made of rattan. A few eddies of cherry blossom petals have come in with the wind as Tatsumi closes the door behind you, and they spiral around your bare feet. Your skin is slick with a patina of mist from your outside walk to this room.
Tatsumi unbuttons your trousers for you, even though you think about pushing his hands away the entire time; it is a step-back moment: a moment in which you are outside of your body, thinking about something else while another being unpeels cloth from your thighs and calves and touches your cock and you watch it all, not disinterested, but with the detached air of the animal photographer in a nature special. In your head a wordless narrative continues when you push Tatsumi's own trousers to the floor and mirror him, hand on his cock, the other on his shoulder, and you press your forehead into the bone of his clavicle, hard and sharp and too jutting to be anything else.
You think for a moment, of the time, weeks ago now, when you had been holed up in a Kyoto magazine kiosk with a girl named Saki, hiding until the Toclafane patrols had moved on, and she had pulled down the thick glossy manga magazines and in broken English laughed with you over the porn in them, yaoi, she said, and she had tried to explain the finer points of seme versus uke. Her fingers had pointed and she had narrated the story for you, her eyes darting to you, and then to the darkened windows of the hut, and you had looked at the pictures and thought about things that you cannot, and will not classify anymore, if you ever did.
Tatsumi lets you push him to the mat and you crawl up his body, your fingers drawing up the skin of his leg, dipping into the inner thighs to push them apart, lowering your head to smell him. Tatsumi's hands grasp your hair lightly, and he says something soft, muddled by the rain outside and obviously not important enough for you to ask him to repeat it. Tatsumi's skin is dusky, there is a rough scar as if something had once slashed open his belly and then sealed it back poorly, and his cock bisects it when it lies there across his belly. You reach up and run your fingers along it, waiting for his hand to stop you, though he never does.
Tatsumi pulls you up to kiss you, and you hold yourself up with your palms, pushing to keep yourself from touching his chest with yours, waiting for a solid moment to settle yourself into him, to push your thighs between his and feel the slide of his skin on the sides of your knees. You feel tired already, as if you have eaten heavily. His eyes are inches from yours when you pull away, wondering just what he means when his hand works your cock, what he means with his little prayers, the ones that he says when he closes his eyes and chants a bit, like you have seen him do over the altar in the kitchen, in the living space, in the courtyard and now here, as he palms you slowly.
There are mechanics that cannot be forgot, of course, and you indulge them, because you understand more than ever the charm and necessity of mechanics: Is that comfortable? Shall you or shall I? My hand is there. Where is your lubricant? Does that feel good? This might be the last time for me ever, you know.
It is not the first time you have had sex without ever closing your eyes, but it is the first time that feels like the end of something. Tatsumi's hands replace clothing at times, or simply act as modest coverings when they cup your balls, or run along the length of your cock. Your fingers press into him and his spine leaves the mat in the centre; you take that moment to put your palm there, pulling him upright like some rag scarecrow you can use to pleasure yourself. His hair falls into his eyes, but his nose rubs into the hollow of your neck when he surges upward, almost falling on your cock when you replace your fingers, sitting on your thighs, his legs impossibly wrapped about your waist so well that you cannot remember when they got there,.
You never actually got to do anything more complex than a shag on the desk with Jack, though he encompasses a great deal of your thoughts in this area (and in a great deal of ways that was stunningly complex), but Lisa and other girls before her, they liked riding you like this, feet pressed to the flat of the bed and pushing, levering like a child's see saw before finding a rhythm that is in part motivated by the slick of sweat and exertion, part by sheer sensation, and part the rote rapid dry-firing, resembling, to the outsider you have always imagined watching you, like a mechanical bull in a backwater pub. You let Tatsumi slow down and speed up, pressing your palms flat out behind you, wondering how far you can get inside him, how much further there is to get inside you fully, if only.
Your brain turns off for the rest of it, because it's for you and you can't look at it, can't think of it as it happ--
You are lying on the raku, a damp sheet pulled over your waist, though it is cool and crisp a bit from the rain. A few thumbnail-size petals stick to your chest, and you leave them there. You are so very undefended right now, you think, as you watch Tatsumi return from the outhouse, bringing wind and rain and flowers with him, you think that right behind him will be a wave of spheres and knives, but there is nothing. And you remember that your host is otherworldly and knowing, in a way, and that he understands that this is the way things are, though, as he has told you, not always the way things will be in a sense. In all senses.
You do not find this comforting.
Tomorrow, he will take you to Yamaguchi, and he will return here, to write more letters, perhaps to save more people, to dress in his clothes, to reach out his ghostly hands and pull yet another soul from some perilous situation. But that person will not be you. You will be in a lorry with Miss Martha Jones, racing towards a mission, a weapon, and a lesson most assuredly.
The bed is stiff and doesn't sag when Tatsumi sits on the edge of it. You had wondered how you were going to ever be able to sleep on something so very hard and unforgivable. It turns out that you don't need softness, and beds aren’t the things that should be forgiving.
Tatsumi examines you in the candlelight, his eyes softened and waiting for something. You think to yourself that he has loved someone once, someone a long time ago, and the thought makes you sentimental and laden with affection, fondness, in some ways. You loved someone once, what seemed like a long time ago, maybe several someones.
"Do you think we'll win?" you finally ask. Your head is muzzy and tired. There is sex and pain and all manner of plans that you are constructing in your head. Somewhere outside the fountain knocks and the rice paper windows rattle a bit in the wind.
Tatsumi reaches out with two fingers to snuff out the last flickering flame, and you close your eyes just before everything darkens. His shadow hands on the wall behind him had seemed like wings, and you want to carry that with you into battle like a farewell missive, a bittersweet goodbye.
END
Author's Notes: I wish I had a good explanation for this. Well, anyway. Heh.
*(wikipedia. Yeah, bite me.)
Fandom: Torchwood/Yami no Matsuei
Characters: Ianto/Tatsumi (references to all TW characters and Tsuzuki)
Rating: NC-17
Timeline: post S1 for TW-aka The Year That Never Was (I call it, 'HOLY SHIT-- APOCALYPSE.') Spoilers for all that stuff, including the DW eps. YnM-no timeline. Just some time.
Summary: Now you are beginning to think that things in Japan never happen to you by accident, though truly, you'd like to think that even though your contact had fallen through, this had been more coincidence and less part of some cosmological design. Even though your host has not been shy about the fact that he is an Angel of Death. An accountant and financial manager, but still. Angel. Of. Death.
The stadium effect is a phenomenon observed in strong tropical cyclones. It is a fairly common event, where the clouds of the eyewall curve outward from the surface with height.*
***
The path leading to Tatsumi's front door is so covered with cherry blossoms that it feels as if you're walking on a carpet. The sound is muted everywhere, as if Tatsumi even charges the birds to sing.
When you get back from the small local still-functioning-but-barely market, cubes of tofu floating merrily in your bucket of water, Tatsumi has returned from the Ministry and is sitting in his kitchen, sipping tea and looking over a stack of papers. Shoes discarded at the door, you set the bucket aside, in the cooler that is so ancient it is just a wooden box with a brick of ice inside, and wash your hands at the tap. A porcelain teacup as it is set down on its saucer is the only sound aside from the splashing water.
The cloth hanging from the hook next to the cupboard is already damp when you run your hands over it, and for a moment you stop to think about how this is as close to your host as you have been since arriving. Tatsumi is distant and allowing, as if he has gathered you up from destruction and is now examining you from a distance to see if you are indeed what he had bargained on.
Even now, as you lean against the counter, hands on the grain and the porcelain rim of the sink, you let your gaze slide outside, to the trees shaking off petals, the frantic bend of branches as the birds leap from limb to limb. The sunset is an angry red swath dragged through blue, something you might have once considered more romantic, more picturesque, if you aren't also terrified to see the occasional black streak on the sky, too slow to be a meteor, to big to be a bird, too deadly to be ignored; when they roll along the horizon, clusters of dark balloons bobbing and whizzing, your heart skips a few beats.
'They can't see you,' Tatsumi says from behind him. 'They're looking, but they can't see us at all.'
You nod, but you keep waiting, waiting until they disappear across the sky, as if they have dissolved.
It had been most odd, that even as you had never been a traveler, never been further than a few weekends in Paris with mates and once with Lisa, you would find yourself fighting for your life and the lives around you on what feels like the opposite end of the earth. You find everything too small, too foreign and while beautiful, you remark to yourself in your rare moments of down time, still so very far from the rolling greens of home, or even the sweep and industry of Cardiff.
There had been the time in Tibet, Owen cursing like a sailor and swearing revenge on Number 10 for suggesting that they chase monsters away from home, like Brecons all over again, but this time there still hadn't been aliens and they are all (still) thousands of miles from home, which had been Saxon's point all along. The misdirection had been so very stunning and obvious you wonder if the team still hadn't been a little shell-shocked from other events when Gwen and Owen had agreed to it all.
You had had your doubts when Tatsumi had picked you up from the side of the road, bloody and terrified, if you are being honest with yourself. The team had split up after the first sweep of the Toclafane through the Tokyo airport (the whole time you had been there Owen had bitched about the fucking layovers everywhere), and while you had travelled with Tosh as far as Osaka, she had stayed behind while you and a small group of resistance fighters had mounted a stand in Kyoto, and then of course, Kyoto isn't there anymore. Osaka is buried under a mountain of ash and rubble, of course, and the last you had heard of Owen and Gwen, they had been striking for Hong Kong with a vitriolic and swaggering group of Triad members who had, for once, decided that they'd rather point their guns at something worth shooting. You like to imagine Owen in the hedonistic cinema-inspired underworld of the East, lazing about on silk divans, curls of opium smoke around his head. Or Gwen, in a smart cheongsam, kicking the ever-loving shite out of something, but you know their lives, if they have them still at all, are much like yours: more North By Northwest and less Rush Hour II.
(Thinking of films at all reminds you of the last good night you'd ever had with Jack, sitting in the tourist office with a bag of microwave popcorn and watching Stalag 17 on the computer. He had spilled popcorn all over you and the waxed loquacious about the finer points of Betty Grable. You might have even smiled more than usual.)
You'd been wandering around near the coast, outside of Matsue, not sure what to do next and waiting for the contact that Tosh had left you with when he'd come out of the rain, and you hadn't been rather trusting of him when he had picked you up, but he hadn't been military and so most of you had been grateful. Now you are beginning to think that things in Japan never happen to you by accident, though truly, you'd like to think that even though your contact hadn't fallen through, this had been more coincidence and less part of some cosmological design.
Even though your host has not been shy about the fact that he is an Angel of Death. An accountant and financial manager, but still, Angel. Of. Death.
Tatsumi has been kind enough to dress you; he has rooms of closets filled with well-made suits and shirts, things all in a size so perilously close to your own that you had been quite suspicious of them in the first place. But Tatsumi, while a bit larger in the chest than you, is exactly your inseam, which you had known from the moment he had stepped from the car, headlights trapping you between the guard rail and the grill. The cloth is softer than anything you have worn in months, and you had forgot that clothing could be like this, that it could be anything other than filthy denims and heavy long sleeves and camouflage jackets with pockets for your many tools and ammo magazines.
You stare out the window in front of you, trying to isolate one single petal as it descends to the ground, much like how, as a child, you had picked out single snowflakes and tried to follow them from sky to drift; looking back, you can't remember a single time you actually saw one land with any certainty.
Tatsumi pulls his tie out. You had missed the fingers when they loosened the Hanover knot and untucked the string of silk, and it's a bit disappointing. The tie slides out of his collar with a gentle hissing sound, almost too loud in the silence. You vaguely understand that outside it has begun to rain, and the sound of it hitting the roof replaces the movement of Tatsumi's tie against his neck almost seamlessly.
You think about Jack, whom you now know sails chained in the belly of the Valiant, and Tosh and Gwen and Owen, even Martha Jones, who shares your name and is currently hiking across Kyushu, spreading the fine gospel of the Doctor. You think about the lorry parked and waiting for you ten miles away, the lorry you will use to smuggle Miss Jones into Hiroshima, should she ever manage to get onto Honshu itself.
You wonder just what you are waiting for. You wonder if you are being held here, in reserve, like some sort of playing card tucked into a sleeve, perhaps the lone pawn at the corner of the board about whom everyone has forgot.
He doesn't need to speak to you, not often, Tatsumi with his delicate eyewear and long neck. Tatsumi clears his throat and you turn to him, the small of your back coming to rest against the countertop, your hands loose and wanting to dip into your pockets.
Tatsumi hands you the small envelope, and you open it, reading down through the rough translation that he has made in the margins, because of course, no matter how quick a study you are, a few months is not enough to learn a passable Japanese kanji. Additionally, you understand from the lines of the characters that the writer is older, from another time, perhaps, and his language is archaic, not to mention his script, possibly the Japanese version of copperplate. Seeing the width of the long strokes bending into the thin wires of the side swipes to the left and right, there in the paper, makes you want to meet its writer, to look at the face and know that it isn't Jack. But it can't be, it's impossible, and anyway, you are decidedly not maudlin.
Martha is on her way, it says, but she has left Kyushu and will be in Yamaguchi in the next three days. There is a meeting place, and you think of how you will never be able to get the truck to her in time. You will simply have to steal another, which is no hardship; cars and trucks litter the roads like so much human detritus. You sigh and look down at Tatsumi from his seat in front of you. He leans back casually in the chair, arm slung over the back, legs crossed, other elbow resting pointedly on the table and a teacup cradled in his fingers.
"I can get you to Yamaguchi," Tatsumi says, his eyes shifting away from the flowers on the table and settling on you, as if they had drifted casually, as if his regarding you is just a stop in a slow saunter around the room. Incidental.
There is nothing to do but nod and look at the daylilies on the table, somewhat framing his face, a little to the side as if they are bending to kiss his profile. You can sense, intrinsically, what that would be like, from a certain point of view. The thread of the idea is intriguing, not unlike discovering an old line in a new poem.
"Tea?" Tatsumi says quietly, and you shiver as the bass of his voice hits the membrane of your ear drums like a buzzing noise that itches. He rises, moves to the kettle on the stove, which probably heats as quietly as everything else in the room. Noise is money. Isn't time money? It is hard to remember.
He polishes his glasses on a small cloth that is probably designed just for that, some scrap of silk that he saves and keeps pristine and reserved for just such moments. You wonder if he actually needs the glasses. It seems a crime that an Angel of Death would have such a handicap for all eternity. Somewhere, someone (maybe Jack, and yet not Jack himself, not truly) had convinced you that all God's creatures were perfect, or at least God's special creatures.
You move from your perch on the other side of the kitchen, still surprised after a few days that your feet don't make noise on the tatami and then the tiling around the stove.
The waistband of his trousers fishtails out from his spine, a cut made for braces. The hairs on the back of his neck are sharp and smooth; you feel as if you want them to be longer. You want his hair to fall down his shoulders in waves that you can grasp, probably something that you have acquired from Lisa's days of watching Japanese animation on your Saturdays off.
Tatsumi lets you pull his braces down to frame his ass, not turning from the stove. Tatsumi lets you wind your hands around his waist and undo the buttons of his trousers. Tatsumi lets you snake your hand into his undergarments and grab his cock, pulling just a little bit on the softness there, much warmer than the rest of him. Tatsumi lets you press your cock in the curve of his clothed arse.
And when he lifts the pot from the stove and sets it aside to cool on the wooden trivet, he turns to you and you let Tatsumi unbutton your waistcoat, your shirt, one button at a time, meticulously, with both hands, as if the task requires them completely. You let Tatsumi part the shirt like a curtain and run his hands across your chest, starting with the clavicles and down, circling your nipples, and then onto the sternum, his fingers drawing invisible calligraphy on your skin. You let him lower his mouth to yours and kiss you, slow, lazy. It is full of nothing urgent. Just full.
You do not think of Owen and his Eastern gear, Jack riding the winds in the sky, Tosh in the dusty rubble of a skyscraper or Gwen in pigtails and china flats. You don't think of Martha Jones, Miss Martha Jones dodging a hundred deadly musical spheres to get to you, to ride on your back as you take her on the next arc of her journey, of how you are just another part of that trip, another gun to keep her safe, another wing to pull over her.
Instead, Tatsumi divests you of you, or the things that until lately had made you entirely you: jacket, waistcoat, tie. Shirt, undershirt. His hands skim across your flies when you let your mouth wander away from his and instead lap at the hollow of his throat. Your fingers find his braces, wrapping them around and around your hands in taut coils, pulling his groin tight to yours. Tatsumi's hair, longer in front than in the back, it seems, whispers across your face when you raise it to rub his temple against yours. Over his shoulder, you see the cloisonné fish swimming on his discarded cufflinks, safely tucked into a spare dish on the windowsill.
You can feel his smile along your cheek; it is a comforting thing, to feel a smile in the middle of all of this, to feel it flutter along the skin like so much silk just before Tatsumi's lips find first your temple then your earlobe, and finally the hinge of jaw below it, tongue teasing something out of you that Lisa had never discovered, that Jack had yet to divine. Your fingers reluctantly release his braces to splay under his shirt, and you unbutton it in reverse, fingers seeking the buttons under the seams, from the bottom up. Tatsumi leans back into the stove to watch you, those eyes still hooded and slow, though his glasses rest, folded neatly, on the sideboard.
Tatsumi's arms come to rest in turn on your shoulders as you pull off first one sleeve and then the next, the shirt dangling from your fingertips until you hook it on the chair back; undershirt follows with the slide and economy of movement that comes with experience of undressing a man. Tatsumi's eyes spark when you indicate that you wouldn't mind retiring to some place else, your fingers hooked into his undergarments and pulling, one long tug of invitation, two fingers a living question mark as they twist the waistband of his shorts.
The bedsheets are neat and folded into piles on the well-swept floor. The raku is cleared and pristine, and for a second you have trouble imagining yourself sprawled out on it, open, in this strange place, nothing in sight to indicate that you belong here, that you are even here and not dead. It has crossed your mind already that this is so-that you are dead and Tatsumi is keeping your soul here for some reason, instead of sending you on to another place, to the afterlife, which, until a few weeks ago, you hadn't given much thought outside of church on Christmas Eve.
Tatsumi has never said that you are dead. He has never indicated why he had picked you up in the middle of the night, has never done more than feed and clothe you, more than give you chores while he writes ceaseless communications with humans in the resistance on your behalf, his handwriting so mysterious and filled with pictographs that you wish you could read it. You know that whatever Toshiko had intended when she had set up the contact, you will never be able to ask her, and you will be forever curious about how much she had known about the Ministry of Hades.
You stand in the doorway of his room and stare at the bed, hands on the door frame; the rain has ceased and you can hear the bamboo fountain in the atrium topple down and back up with a hollow knocking sound, a woodpecker made of rattan. A few eddies of cherry blossom petals have come in with the wind as Tatsumi closes the door behind you, and they spiral around your bare feet. Your skin is slick with a patina of mist from your outside walk to this room.
Tatsumi unbuttons your trousers for you, even though you think about pushing his hands away the entire time; it is a step-back moment: a moment in which you are outside of your body, thinking about something else while another being unpeels cloth from your thighs and calves and touches your cock and you watch it all, not disinterested, but with the detached air of the animal photographer in a nature special. In your head a wordless narrative continues when you push Tatsumi's own trousers to the floor and mirror him, hand on his cock, the other on his shoulder, and you press your forehead into the bone of his clavicle, hard and sharp and too jutting to be anything else.
You think for a moment, of the time, weeks ago now, when you had been holed up in a Kyoto magazine kiosk with a girl named Saki, hiding until the Toclafane patrols had moved on, and she had pulled down the thick glossy manga magazines and in broken English laughed with you over the porn in them, yaoi, she said, and she had tried to explain the finer points of seme versus uke. Her fingers had pointed and she had narrated the story for you, her eyes darting to you, and then to the darkened windows of the hut, and you had looked at the pictures and thought about things that you cannot, and will not classify anymore, if you ever did.
Tatsumi lets you push him to the mat and you crawl up his body, your fingers drawing up the skin of his leg, dipping into the inner thighs to push them apart, lowering your head to smell him. Tatsumi's hands grasp your hair lightly, and he says something soft, muddled by the rain outside and obviously not important enough for you to ask him to repeat it. Tatsumi's skin is dusky, there is a rough scar as if something had once slashed open his belly and then sealed it back poorly, and his cock bisects it when it lies there across his belly. You reach up and run your fingers along it, waiting for his hand to stop you, though he never does.
Tatsumi pulls you up to kiss you, and you hold yourself up with your palms, pushing to keep yourself from touching his chest with yours, waiting for a solid moment to settle yourself into him, to push your thighs between his and feel the slide of his skin on the sides of your knees. You feel tired already, as if you have eaten heavily. His eyes are inches from yours when you pull away, wondering just what he means when his hand works your cock, what he means with his little prayers, the ones that he says when he closes his eyes and chants a bit, like you have seen him do over the altar in the kitchen, in the living space, in the courtyard and now here, as he palms you slowly.
There are mechanics that cannot be forgot, of course, and you indulge them, because you understand more than ever the charm and necessity of mechanics: Is that comfortable? Shall you or shall I? My hand is there. Where is your lubricant? Does that feel good? This might be the last time for me ever, you know.
It is not the first time you have had sex without ever closing your eyes, but it is the first time that feels like the end of something. Tatsumi's hands replace clothing at times, or simply act as modest coverings when they cup your balls, or run along the length of your cock. Your fingers press into him and his spine leaves the mat in the centre; you take that moment to put your palm there, pulling him upright like some rag scarecrow you can use to pleasure yourself. His hair falls into his eyes, but his nose rubs into the hollow of your neck when he surges upward, almost falling on your cock when you replace your fingers, sitting on your thighs, his legs impossibly wrapped about your waist so well that you cannot remember when they got there,.
You never actually got to do anything more complex than a shag on the desk with Jack, though he encompasses a great deal of your thoughts in this area (and in a great deal of ways that was stunningly complex), but Lisa and other girls before her, they liked riding you like this, feet pressed to the flat of the bed and pushing, levering like a child's see saw before finding a rhythm that is in part motivated by the slick of sweat and exertion, part by sheer sensation, and part the rote rapid dry-firing, resembling, to the outsider you have always imagined watching you, like a mechanical bull in a backwater pub. You let Tatsumi slow down and speed up, pressing your palms flat out behind you, wondering how far you can get inside him, how much further there is to get inside you fully, if only.
Your brain turns off for the rest of it, because it's for you and you can't look at it, can't think of it as it happ--
You are lying on the raku, a damp sheet pulled over your waist, though it is cool and crisp a bit from the rain. A few thumbnail-size petals stick to your chest, and you leave them there. You are so very undefended right now, you think, as you watch Tatsumi return from the outhouse, bringing wind and rain and flowers with him, you think that right behind him will be a wave of spheres and knives, but there is nothing. And you remember that your host is otherworldly and knowing, in a way, and that he understands that this is the way things are, though, as he has told you, not always the way things will be in a sense. In all senses.
You do not find this comforting.
Tomorrow, he will take you to Yamaguchi, and he will return here, to write more letters, perhaps to save more people, to dress in his clothes, to reach out his ghostly hands and pull yet another soul from some perilous situation. But that person will not be you. You will be in a lorry with Miss Martha Jones, racing towards a mission, a weapon, and a lesson most assuredly.
The bed is stiff and doesn't sag when Tatsumi sits on the edge of it. You had wondered how you were going to ever be able to sleep on something so very hard and unforgivable. It turns out that you don't need softness, and beds aren’t the things that should be forgiving.
Tatsumi examines you in the candlelight, his eyes softened and waiting for something. You think to yourself that he has loved someone once, someone a long time ago, and the thought makes you sentimental and laden with affection, fondness, in some ways. You loved someone once, what seemed like a long time ago, maybe several someones.
"Do you think we'll win?" you finally ask. Your head is muzzy and tired. There is sex and pain and all manner of plans that you are constructing in your head. Somewhere outside the fountain knocks and the rice paper windows rattle a bit in the wind.
Tatsumi reaches out with two fingers to snuff out the last flickering flame, and you close your eyes just before everything darkens. His shadow hands on the wall behind him had seemed like wings, and you want to carry that with you into battle like a farewell missive, a bittersweet goodbye.
END
Author's Notes: I wish I had a good explanation for this. Well, anyway. Heh.
*(wikipedia. Yeah, bite me.)