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The bed dips beside Kazuha, and his eyes snap open while his body stays perfectly still.
He knows who it is. There’s nobody else who it could be, but the impossibility of the situation makes Kazuha pause. Every time Scaramouche has looked at him in the past week has made Kazuha feel like a chicken with his head on the chopping block, helplessly gazing up at his butcher. Unwilling but made to be still.
So why would he crawl into a bed with Kazuha? Why would he lower himself, offering his neck to the piece of meat he already knows he owns?
Kazuha suddenly feels bare. He’s wearing an oversized shirt and a pair of soft boxers, his skin hot to the touch between scratchy hotel sheets. If Scaramouche touches him he will feel him. There is nothing between them. Not makeup, not sweat, not even an illusion of disinterest.
Because that’s the only reason why Scaramouche would be in bed with him, right? To touch him?
Although Kazuha is often the one who bites, he can vividly picture himself plated like a gourmet meal. Steaming atop the white tablecloth that is his sheets. Garnished with a pink glow that spreads down his face and chest as Scaramouche breathes beside him.
When he feels his fingertips brush over his shoulder, he wants to sob.
“Are you awake?” Scaramouche asks. It’s quiet. The quietest Kazuha has heard him in a while. These days, even while he’s not speaking, Scaramouche’s presence is overwhelming.
“Mm.” Kazuha dares not say more. If he asks, Scaramouche may leave.
His fingers return, tightening on his shoulder. He pushes Kazuha down to the bed, forcing him onto his back. It’s firm, but Kazuha could easily resist.
He doesn’t, though.
He really never does.
I should work on that, Kazuha thinks dazedly as he looks up at Scaramouche through half-lidded eyes.
He’s stunning like always. A long while ago, Kazuha stopped attempting to describe Scaramouche using normal terms. There’s no point in telling someone that he’s gorgeous when he’s everything that Kazuha will ever want.
His hair is mussed, though. Scaramouche doesn’t really get eyebags, but the area around his eyes look like it aches with restlessness. His expression is intense and beseeching. He can tell that Scaramouche is searching for something in Kazuha’s face.
He doesn’t find it. Scaramouche shifts, one leg resting in between Kazuha’s above the covers. He leans over him carefully, supported by a single arm near Kazuha’s head.
His touch is almost unfamiliar. Kazuha hates that it’s gotten to that point.
The hotel air becomes more stale with every breath Kazuha sucks in. He slowly lifts a hand from underneath the covers, showing Scaramouche its path like he’s calming a beast. The moment it rests against the side of Scaramouche’s face, it’s like he’s pressing ice to a wound.
Kazuha’s mouth parts to breathe a silent, relieved moan.
Then he is plunged into ice cold water, shocking all of his nerves into stillness.
Scaramouche’s mouth on his is a feeling indescribable. Kazuha gasps in stuttered little intervals, trying to inhale and empty his lungs simultaneously. Scaramouche moves fluidly, properly straddling Kazuha with his knees on either side of his waist.
It’s a disturbingly new feeling. Kazuha wants it to feel like it used to, as natural as breathing. As human as crying.
Kauzha needs Scaramouche and he needs him now. He needs him, he needs him, “I need you,” He slurs together, suddenly overcome.
Scaramouche either doesn’t hear it or pretends not to. If it’s the latter then Kazuha feels like shattering, but since it’s impossible to know he can only sit there and be fragile. He kisses like he never has before, forcing Kazuha’s jaws open like a disobedient dog, trying to shake out a foreign object that will make Kazuha choke if he swallows it. He grips Kazuha’s chin with bruising force and tilts him in any way he desires.
Kazuha lets it happen, he always does, he always will.
Scaramouche’s tongue is inside of him, licking. Tasting the smooth planes of Kazuha’s teeth and working its way in the crevices between them like he’s trying to taste Kazuha’s dinner. He tastes the marbled, dappled of the roof of Kazuha’s mouth, reaches so far back in his throat that he swears it touches his vocal chords.
Kazuha feels like he’s going a little insane already. If Scaramouche wants to taste the very flesh in him that vibrates to create his music, the tendons that sing only for him, he can. He can take them. Like the Little Mermaid.
Kazuha laughs but it only happens in his head. His body is currently occupied.
“Fuck.” Scaramouche sounds rushed when he pulls back. Like he has something urgent that he simply just remembered. But he pushes back into Kazuha nonetheless.
Time passes like that. Kazuha’s eyes practically roll up into his skull, unseeing as Scaramouche uses his mouth as he sees fit. He can feel… something, radiating off of Scaramouche in freezing cold waves of energy. Anger? Frustration? Hate? Kazuha can’t tell, which makes him tense in turn.
After nearly twenty minutes (Kazuha hasn’t been counting, necessarily– he’s been counting down the time until he’s not allowed this anymore) Scaramouche attempts to pull back with finality.
Kazuha’s arms fly up immediately, wrapping around Scaramouche’s back and pushing them together, attempting to fuse with him in a way that would render him incapable of movement. One creature forever. Beast with two backs.
Scaramouche swears under his breath and shakes his head at Kazuha. He’s open mouthed and panting, his lips reddened. Sometimes Kazuha registers Scaramouche in this state as having a healthy glow of sorts, but whatever is happening here, it is not healthy.
Kazuha longs to indulge.
He urges up, trying to reconnect with Scaramouche. One taste of water after a drought will never quench his thirst. He needs more–
Scaramouche throws himself to the side entirely and rips the covers off of the bed.
It happens so quickly that Kazuha can only blink stupidly, stunned. The covers had already mostly slipped off of his torso. It shouldn’t have impeded whatever Scaramouche had planned.
Here, Kazuha grows bold. He opens his mouth to ask.
He is silenced, but not by Scaramouche’s lips.
One of Scaramouche’s hands had slipped under his shirt.
Whatever Kazuha was going to say dies in his throat, curled up and withered. He can only watch in shock as Scaramouche’s finger hooks under his boxers.
Their eyes meet.
They are both desperate for an explanation. They stare at each other like specimens would from across a lab. Whatever is about to happen to them will be out of their control, but they will go through it together.
At least, that’s how Kazuha sees it. It takes him moments too long to realize that what Scaramouche is searching for is permission.
Consent.
The word floats in Kazuha’s head. They’ve never done this before. Images flash before Kazuha, years of this being drilled into his head. An outfit is not consent. Silence is not consent.
Is this consent? Is this consent, for Kazuha to be trembling underneath the only other creature on this earth that may have glimpsed the truly dark parts of Kazuha’s psyche?
He pictures himself as a court case, examined from all angles. Does this count?
He knows it would be simple to just nod. Maybe he could open his mouth and say yes.
But his head is a maelstrom. There is something so, so, so right about this. Kazuha knows that their actions are right. These are the movements that he’s always wanted to take with Scaramouche. But there’s a gleam in Scaramouche’s eye, there’s a twitching finger.
Kazuha aches.
Is that a yes? Scaramouche asks him, with his gaze. The hand slipped into his boxers moves just an inch.
Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes, Kazuha says in the way he stares. YES, he cries with his breath, and yet something in him is begging him to stop.
The first touch against him has Kazuha crying out like a porn star. It’s cliche. It’s so much, though.
Scaramouche almost looks scared for a second, but then the gleam returns and the emotion starts to pour off of him again.
His boxers are slid off of his body smoothly. Kazuha barely realizes its happening, but Scaramouche is methodical about it. He sits on Kazuha’s thighs, still fully dressed in loose sleep pants and a shirt. In between them, pressed like a secret, is a part of Kazuha’s body that he has always half-ignored being held in the palm of someone he has never once been able to look away from.
He knows Scaramouche is inexperienced, but so is he. The first few strokes are clumsy and wobbling, but all Kazuha can register is touch, skin, he’s touching me.
Kazuha can only watch Scaramouche. He isn’t looking at Kazuha’s face, he’s looking down into that space between them with a focus that he’s only seen directed on a test. Those tests they used to take in class that Kazuha would do nothing but watch Scaramouche during. The reminder of those days, contrasted with what they’re doing right now, makes Kazuha gasp.
He imagines Scaramouche arguing about gay marriage. He imagines that same Scaramouche in his lap, dragging his palm over Kazuha so roughly that it makes them both groan.
It’s barely been two minutes.
Kazuha…. Oh, oh, oh, fuck.
“Scara,” he whimpers. He has never whimpered before. It makes him feel like crumbling. “I, it’s comin’.”
It’s not that Kazuha has never had an orgasm before. He certainly has. Most of them were spent in a desperate position like this one, alone with his delusions. But Scaramouche is here and close, and Kazuha just feels so fucking embarrassed. He should last longer than this.
“Stop crying.” Scaramouche’s voice is clear. Kazuha isn’t crying actual tears, he knows what Scaramouche means. Stop complaining, stop speaking. Stop.
Something feels wrong. For some reason, that only pushes him further.
“I can’t.”
He can’t come first. He realizes this with a bang. Scaramouche is supposed to be the one where he is right now, that’s their usual dynamic. Kazuha is supposed to make him helpless, he’s supposed to make him feel good. But Scaramouche is jerking him off and scowling in his lap.
Is he not happy?
Kazuha panics.
“I can’t!” He nearly shouts it.
“Stop that,” Scaramouche says again. “You can.”
“But, you–”
Scaramouche covers his mouth.
Kazuha can’t hold on anymore. He squeezes his eyes shut against Scaramouche, pressing his face into Scaramouche’s palm so hard that his teeth surely make an imprint on the back of his lips.
Coming feels familiar. It’s that sudden spike, at the summit before pitching yourself off so quickly that you can’t pinpoint the moment you hit the peak. It all just becomes pleasure.
But this pleasure feels fake.
Scaramouche isn’t happy.
As soon as he’s done coming, he hastily reaches down to wipe it away and is trying to reach Scaramouche. He wants to pull his pants off, but Scaramouche shrinks back immediately.
“Stop.”
“But–”
“I don’t want that.”
That is not consent.
Kazuha stops immediately. He doesn’t have permission to touch Scaramouche back?
The revelation crushes him.
He doesn’t know what to do now. He’s floundering, open mouthed and unsure. All he wants is to make this feeling in his gut disappear. He wants to make this good for Scaramouche.
His hesitancy makes him pliant. Scaramouche scoots forward again, and this time he gathers Kazuha’s hands in one of his own and clumsily pushes them against the bed. Kazuha could break free if he liked, but he can tell Scaramouche doesn’t want him to.
Scaramouche’s hips move, and he’s…
Grinding on his thigh.
Kazuha feels like dying.
This time, his eyes truly do fill with tears.
Of course, this act isn’t what’s making him upset. It’s whatever Scaramouche wants, forever and always. But Kazuha knows something is wrong, he knows Scaramouche isn’t enjoying himself.
And that is the whole point of this all.
But he doesn’t move. He just… quietly exits his body for a moment. He pretends that maybe he’s asleep with his eyes open, that he’s dreaming this up. That he’s doing this to himself.
Eventually, a quiet grunt brings him back to his body. Something is wet against him.
Scaramouche came.
He wants to sit up and look. He tries to, but Scaramouche is already gone.
Oh, fuck.
He hears the flick of the bathroom light turning on, the buzz of fluorescent lights following.
Kazuha lays there and feels filthy and clean at the same time.
Scaramouche returns wearing different pants. He offers a wad of toilet paper to Kazuha, which he drags over himself to try and seem normal.
Scaramouche hardly looks at him the entire time. After the wad of paper has been haphazardly tossed in the direction of the wastebasket, Scaramouche curls up in Kazuha’s bed. He’s facing away from him.
He falls asleep.
The air conditioning kicks on.
Kazuha sits on his bed in the lotus position with no sheets and no covers, feeling cold.
He doesn’t know what he wanted. He hadn’t even allowed himself to speculate about how that encounter could have gone.
But he didn’t want that.
Kazuha wants to cry but no liquid springs to his eyes. He has been scraped raw of anything he had left– there’s no other way to describe it. Scaramouche has reached inside of him and taken the last of him, raked fingernails down the sides of him, like a gutted pumpkin ready to be illuminated with a new light.
But that light doesn’t come. All that’s left is him.
Ready to rot.