Page 77 of Damian & Jun: Episodes 1-4
It was possible that broken and bruised suited his pursuer perfectly well. But Jun wasn’t a gladiator. He wasn’t going to march into the arena willingly and salute the man responsible for his unasked-for doom.
The man bowed and backed away. “I will observe from a distance; the door must remain open.”
Jun gave a curt nod and turned. His hands shook as he stripped.
You’re giving in.
Was he?
No, he was buying time. Time for what? That remained unknown. But each moment his skin went untouched was another moment he belonged to himself.
Himself.
Tears burned. He hadn’t belonged to himself for so long. Perhaps not until the moment he had crawled out the window. Or maybe every moment with Damian had been stolen moments of himself, of belonging to himself. Somehow falling into Damian’s touch made him own himself again; surrendering to Damian’s kisses was like buying freedom. Being caught by Damian by the river was being pulled back to dry land.
I want that. Not this.
Damian was poison to his old life. A steady drip of doubt joining the memories of his mother. And Richard was an antidote, a chilled brandy served unexpectedly on a warm summer day. He was mixing his imagery, or was it that he was mixing his perspective? Silent Jun and rebellious Jun spun around each other.
Time. He needed to buy time. Someone had made a promise, but he couldn’t bear to remember it. It needed, to linger, unspoken, unexamined. Belief was too fragile a thing to test.
Rigid fingers dragged the blue and black clothing from his body. The water was warm but the hard lines of muscle in his back never released. His hands moved, wielding razors, brushes, and bottles of gels. He watched them, strange appendages. Human thumbs were an odd shape, so ugly compared to fingers. They didn’t belong to him; they weren’t a part of him. They existed without a head or a torso, flesh-covered entities, moving, touching, working. Towel around his waist, he ignored the scented bath waiting in the covered tub. In the mirror, dead eyes in a vaguely familiar face watched as those hands applied lotions and serums, sunscreen, and foundation. He styled his hair, rote motion and preset decisions following one after the other like ones and zeros in a program. He’d found a crack in his psyche and slid through, leaving his body a doll he could watch perform. But there was a rogue line, a bit of poetry slipping through. He watched, unaware, as the lines of black around his eyes thickened, the edges sharpened into points, gray eyeshadow smudged along his upper and lower lids. He stained his lips the color of roses.
He was beautiful, a dream of desire, an aberration of compliance. His hand wrapped around the black pen he’d just used to cut the corners of his eyes. He dragged the tip around the outline of his mouth, darkening the aperture. If only he had fangs. He deepened the shadows above and below his eye, erasing the teahouse doll, leaving someone dark and bitter in the mirror, beautiful as ordered but poisoned.
Better.
Let them lie; he was going to paint their words on his skin. They had forgotten he was the songwriter, the dancer, the producer of fantasy.
He let the towel fall to the floor and drew ??? (crazed butterfly) in sharp black strokes down his ribs, each character below the other.
A large foreign hand grabbed his wrist. “Unnecessary.”
Jun raised his eyes slowly, black stylus tight in his grip. He switched it to his free hand. The deep tan of the skin of that hand was not dark enough to be his lover and too dark to be his own. A canvas half washed in color, hinting at its future image.
? he wrote on the swell of the knuckle just before the thumb. Blade.
“Stop.” The hand tightened. The man’s other hand was coming up, twisting across his body, reaching for the only voice Jun owned.
Jun spun away, his body twisting, willow supple beneath his reach. He danced back toward the double glass doors. Through the windows, snow was falling
December: the season of crystalline grief.
One flake swirled beneath the trap of the roof and the corner. Damian. Damian had held his hand once as they met up in the dark. The snow had been falling around them. Was it only last February?
The ? man was moving toward him. Jun bounded deeper into the house. The hallway beyond this receiving room opened up into a long formal hall with traditional seating and art. The walls were punctuated with floor-to-ceiling glass doors leading out to beautiful gardens, moss-covered stones, and brown ponds of lotus roots and reeds frozen placid below the bare branches of wintering zelkova and maple trees. The bare branches fanned out through the evergreen trunks of Manchurian fir and pine.
He flung back the sliding door at the end of the room and stumbled over a thick green rug. Incense burned on a low side table and a large low bed, padded cuffs hanging from the four corners, filled the side of the room. His feet curled into the thick piling, finding traction. He gripped the footboard of the bed, pushing forward toward the next door. Cold air washed over his bare abs. He leaped over the railing, dropping into the garden below. Fresh fallen snow melted beneath his feet, watering the moss.
He slid to the bottom of the natural valley in which the garden had been wrought. His toes found the edge of one of the ponds. White and orange koi drifted below the surface. They should have the hanzi for beautiful drawn on them. But he was running. His feet were on the smooth stones of the path. He spun, arms out, grabbing the pillars anchoring the bridge across the water. A glance back, just once. The man was there far above, looking down from the railing.
Jun flew over the bridge, feet turning numb on the polished wood. Steps cut into the side of the hill led up to a pavilion. Braziers burned inside. Jun stepped inside. Food in covered dishes on warmers lay inside on a low table. He turned back, looking at the house.
The garden was an oasis of human habitation moored in a sea of trees slowly turning white. A shroud of clouds hung on the mountain. Not even a sliver of road was to be seen.
Damian.
Yohei.
