[Fic] the last night of the world
Title: the last night of the world
Fandom: Crossroads (Philippines - WW2 AU)
Characters: Fujioka Midori, Yomohiro Tomoe | Midori/Tomoe
Word Count: 1,448
Rating: M
Warning/s: implied prostitution, implied holy crap i wrote non-kink sex
Summary: She can hear the water leaking from the faucet of the adjacent bathroom, a rhythmic drip drip drip that beat in perfect cadence with Midori's heartbeat. | midori, tomoe, and stolen moments in the midst of a war
Disclaimer: Midori is Arah's!
Notes: 1. i was reading my noir fiction book and i wanted something set in the philippines (again); (2) this is in no way historically accurate; (3) inspired by the miss saigon song of the same title #30DaysofErotica
She can hear the water leaking from the faucet of the adjacent bathroom, a rhythmic drip drip drip that beat in perfect cadence with Midori's heartbeat. Here in the darkness between the last remnants of night and the inevitable arrival of dawn, she feels content, complete. Or as ephemerally happy as a half-blood with her light hair and gray eyes was allowed to be. She is the product of a liaison between an American soldier and a Japanese prostitute, banished from her native shore where she didn't belong.
She does not belong anywhere.
Here, in the war-torn streets of Manila, where the steady rat-tat-tat of gunfire and the heavy copper stench of blood are just as common as the clop of horses' hooves and the delicious aroma of pan de sal, she has at least found a place to stay and a means to keep herself alive. They give her sidelong glances, this half-blood who was too fair for a Manileño but had eyes too slanted to be a 'kano, but they give her a wide berth as long as she does not let it slip that she carries the blood of the enemy in their veins. Any hint of connection with the "bastard pigs and rapists," even just a suggestion of it, was likely to get one brought to the nearest jailhouse - if lucky. Every morning, she picks her way past the decaying body of a suspected Makapili, his eyes gouged out and his mouth open in a soundless shout, on her way to the bar where "exotic" hostesses like her were the rage.
Funny that they serve Japanese soldiers here, when the neighborhood is united and festering with resentment. There is very little that can unite society better than a shared anger and hatred.
This is where she meets him, Corporal Fujioka Midori, tall and uncomfortable in the straps of his uniform. This is what she thinks first about him: he is just a boy caught in a war. The other hostesses, they take bets between themselves on who would turn the corporal's head and entice him to take them home. They giggle and point and she itches to tell them that his shit would smell as bad as the rest of them. But she ignores them, and him, and goes about the bar getting her ass pinched and her breasts squeezed as she serves the soldiers their drinks.
This is the only way she can make a living.
She takes the name Tomoe because it describes the swirl of emptiness that has been her life. The Japanese men like the pretense of a Japanese woman with the face of a Filipina. Sometimes she goes with them after the bar closes, though never to her house - always the nearest hotel or, if the soldier is particularly drunk, the nearest dark alley where he can hitch up her skirt and hike down his pants. It's almost always over in less than an hour and she's several pesos richer.
This is the only way she can live.
Midori is sitting by the counter with his hands cupped around a tankard of cheap, foul-smelling beer when she finally talks to him. He isn't drinking, just staring at the yellow liquid and tracing meandering shapes on the condensation clinging to the glass. He looked so forlorn then, so lost as if he were imagining himself to be someplace else rather than trapped in a war fought for a cause he didn't even believe in, that she felt the sudden connection of kinship, of familiarity, because they are just two pawns caught in a game that was larger than them. She slides in the empty seat beside him.
"Your first assignment tomorrow?" She asks in Japanese as she places her tray on top of the counter.
From the corner of her eyes she sees him start and slightly draw backward with a terse motion of his shoulders. She turns towards him this time, and the light of the bar is just enough to throw a shadow across the bruise on her cheekbone.
There is no pity in his gaze. Instead, something hardens in the line of his jaw.
He grits his teeth and nods.
She sighs and it might have been weary. "Come back tomorrow in one piece, then." She pushes herself off the seat and takes her tray. "The next drink is on me."
He came back, with a gash beneath his eyebrow but whole and otherwise uninjured, and she realizes she had been waiting.
This is how her loneliness spills over - like a glass of water overflowing and there is no room for anything else anymore. He seems to understand this, and lets her be on her own; but she can feel the weight of his presence close enough to reach and she doesn't know when this becomes enough, just that it does.
She is the one who takes him home, past the darkened eskinitas, past a small bridge following the path of black muddy water, past the shanties with their GI sheet roofs and scavenged plywood. With every step she risks being discovered and winding up the next dead body in the street that people will walk around, but his hand is warm in hers and she feels alive in the night air smelling of gunpowder and the far away cries of stray dogs.
When she lifts the sheet of wood that is her front door, her fingers are trembling and it takes her several tries. He waits patiently by the threshold of her house, which is hidden behind the dense mass of rubble from a historic building that had been shelled during the first wave of the Japanese invasion. The homeless family that sometimes takes refuge beside the fountain of what once was a plaza is not there tonight.
She wants to apologize for the state of house - a small side table she'd taken from a dumpsite and carefully cleaned with pieces of a sponge, a bare mattress with a stain down its middle she couldn't seem to remove, a plastic dresser with three cabinets and only one handle. She'd chosen the space nearest the bathroom, where water still flowed from time to time. Its tiles were cracked but she could bathe in it every other day - better than the more squalid conditions of the settlers near the area. She rubs her suddenly sweaty palms against the pleats of her skirt and looks away.
He takes her hands, then, slowly, carefully, and brings them close to him as if he is marveling at her calloused fingers and chipped nails. He kisses her knuckles with a trembling, fluttering contact and if before she had wondered whether this display of her worthlessness would disgust him, she wonders now how happy she could make him between her thighs.
He is slow and steady - intent. Feeling the curves and surfaces of her skin with an intensity that makes her breathless and wanted. When the light of a passing car slides through the holes in her wall, there is no pity in his gaze but something soft. She must have loved him at that moment, and loved him once more when he pauses on top of her and asks her if he should continue, if this is all right with her. This question is such a novelty that it takes her a while to respond, and she tugs on his corded arms as he takes that silence for a hesitation.
They make love with all the fumbling of two teenagers coming together and discovering the pleasures of the flesh. He thumps his forehead against hers and their teeth clack together when she arches up for a kiss. But there is grace in their inelegance, or a grace borne by their honest earnestness in a world where lies have become the means to live and the only way to get by is to fool oneself that you are living.
In the morning, she slips out of his arms and buys pan de sal with what meager money she has. They have a feast of bread and cold, instant coffee on her worn mattress and when the cups are empty and set aside, the plastic devoid of all but crumbs, she slides closer to him as he moves towards her, and their fingers tangle in the bare space between their bodies.
She whispers, Come back to me, and his lashes flutter against her cheekbone with all the solemnity of a butterfly's wings.
In another life she is just a woman and he is just a man and they spin the thread of their lives in their own grasp.
This entry was originally posted at http://quadrantal.dreamwidth.org/14852.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Fandom: Crossroads (Philippines - WW2 AU)
Characters: Fujioka Midori, Yomohiro Tomoe | Midori/Tomoe
Word Count: 1,448
Rating: M
Warning/s: implied prostitution, implied holy crap i wrote non-kink sex
Summary: She can hear the water leaking from the faucet of the adjacent bathroom, a rhythmic drip drip drip that beat in perfect cadence with Midori's heartbeat. | midori, tomoe, and stolen moments in the midst of a war
Disclaimer: Midori is Arah's!
Notes: 1. i was reading my noir fiction book and i wanted something set in the philippines (again); (2) this is in no way historically accurate; (3) inspired by the miss saigon song of the same title #30DaysofErotica
She can hear the water leaking from the faucet of the adjacent bathroom, a rhythmic drip drip drip that beat in perfect cadence with Midori's heartbeat. Here in the darkness between the last remnants of night and the inevitable arrival of dawn, she feels content, complete. Or as ephemerally happy as a half-blood with her light hair and gray eyes was allowed to be. She is the product of a liaison between an American soldier and a Japanese prostitute, banished from her native shore where she didn't belong.
She does not belong anywhere.
Here, in the war-torn streets of Manila, where the steady rat-tat-tat of gunfire and the heavy copper stench of blood are just as common as the clop of horses' hooves and the delicious aroma of pan de sal, she has at least found a place to stay and a means to keep herself alive. They give her sidelong glances, this half-blood who was too fair for a Manileño but had eyes too slanted to be a 'kano, but they give her a wide berth as long as she does not let it slip that she carries the blood of the enemy in their veins. Any hint of connection with the "bastard pigs and rapists," even just a suggestion of it, was likely to get one brought to the nearest jailhouse - if lucky. Every morning, she picks her way past the decaying body of a suspected Makapili, his eyes gouged out and his mouth open in a soundless shout, on her way to the bar where "exotic" hostesses like her were the rage.
Funny that they serve Japanese soldiers here, when the neighborhood is united and festering with resentment. There is very little that can unite society better than a shared anger and hatred.
This is where she meets him, Corporal Fujioka Midori, tall and uncomfortable in the straps of his uniform. This is what she thinks first about him: he is just a boy caught in a war. The other hostesses, they take bets between themselves on who would turn the corporal's head and entice him to take them home. They giggle and point and she itches to tell them that his shit would smell as bad as the rest of them. But she ignores them, and him, and goes about the bar getting her ass pinched and her breasts squeezed as she serves the soldiers their drinks.
This is the only way she can make a living.
She takes the name Tomoe because it describes the swirl of emptiness that has been her life. The Japanese men like the pretense of a Japanese woman with the face of a Filipina. Sometimes she goes with them after the bar closes, though never to her house - always the nearest hotel or, if the soldier is particularly drunk, the nearest dark alley where he can hitch up her skirt and hike down his pants. It's almost always over in less than an hour and she's several pesos richer.
This is the only way she can live.
Midori is sitting by the counter with his hands cupped around a tankard of cheap, foul-smelling beer when she finally talks to him. He isn't drinking, just staring at the yellow liquid and tracing meandering shapes on the condensation clinging to the glass. He looked so forlorn then, so lost as if he were imagining himself to be someplace else rather than trapped in a war fought for a cause he didn't even believe in, that she felt the sudden connection of kinship, of familiarity, because they are just two pawns caught in a game that was larger than them. She slides in the empty seat beside him.
"Your first assignment tomorrow?" She asks in Japanese as she places her tray on top of the counter.
From the corner of her eyes she sees him start and slightly draw backward with a terse motion of his shoulders. She turns towards him this time, and the light of the bar is just enough to throw a shadow across the bruise on her cheekbone.
There is no pity in his gaze. Instead, something hardens in the line of his jaw.
He grits his teeth and nods.
She sighs and it might have been weary. "Come back tomorrow in one piece, then." She pushes herself off the seat and takes her tray. "The next drink is on me."
He came back, with a gash beneath his eyebrow but whole and otherwise uninjured, and she realizes she had been waiting.
This is how her loneliness spills over - like a glass of water overflowing and there is no room for anything else anymore. He seems to understand this, and lets her be on her own; but she can feel the weight of his presence close enough to reach and she doesn't know when this becomes enough, just that it does.
She is the one who takes him home, past the darkened eskinitas, past a small bridge following the path of black muddy water, past the shanties with their GI sheet roofs and scavenged plywood. With every step she risks being discovered and winding up the next dead body in the street that people will walk around, but his hand is warm in hers and she feels alive in the night air smelling of gunpowder and the far away cries of stray dogs.
When she lifts the sheet of wood that is her front door, her fingers are trembling and it takes her several tries. He waits patiently by the threshold of her house, which is hidden behind the dense mass of rubble from a historic building that had been shelled during the first wave of the Japanese invasion. The homeless family that sometimes takes refuge beside the fountain of what once was a plaza is not there tonight.
She wants to apologize for the state of house - a small side table she'd taken from a dumpsite and carefully cleaned with pieces of a sponge, a bare mattress with a stain down its middle she couldn't seem to remove, a plastic dresser with three cabinets and only one handle. She'd chosen the space nearest the bathroom, where water still flowed from time to time. Its tiles were cracked but she could bathe in it every other day - better than the more squalid conditions of the settlers near the area. She rubs her suddenly sweaty palms against the pleats of her skirt and looks away.
He takes her hands, then, slowly, carefully, and brings them close to him as if he is marveling at her calloused fingers and chipped nails. He kisses her knuckles with a trembling, fluttering contact and if before she had wondered whether this display of her worthlessness would disgust him, she wonders now how happy she could make him between her thighs.
He is slow and steady - intent. Feeling the curves and surfaces of her skin with an intensity that makes her breathless and wanted. When the light of a passing car slides through the holes in her wall, there is no pity in his gaze but something soft. She must have loved him at that moment, and loved him once more when he pauses on top of her and asks her if he should continue, if this is all right with her. This question is such a novelty that it takes her a while to respond, and she tugs on his corded arms as he takes that silence for a hesitation.
They make love with all the fumbling of two teenagers coming together and discovering the pleasures of the flesh. He thumps his forehead against hers and their teeth clack together when she arches up for a kiss. But there is grace in their inelegance, or a grace borne by their honest earnestness in a world where lies have become the means to live and the only way to get by is to fool oneself that you are living.
In the morning, she slips out of his arms and buys pan de sal with what meager money she has. They have a feast of bread and cold, instant coffee on her worn mattress and when the cups are empty and set aside, the plastic devoid of all but crumbs, she slides closer to him as he moves towards her, and their fingers tangle in the bare space between their bodies.
She whispers, Come back to me, and his lashes flutter against her cheekbone with all the solemnity of a butterfly's wings.
In another life she is just a woman and he is just a man and they spin the thread of their lives in their own grasp.
This entry was originally posted at http://quadrantal.dreamwidth.org/14852.html. Please comment there using OpenID.