Work Text:
There are hands coiled around his throat so tight he cannot get a breath in through them; solid fingers, steady grip, his vision going dark at the edges. He feels weightless; thoughtless. He feels like he barely belongs in this body at all.
The fingers release; he gasps in air desperately, coughing between wheezes. The man above him, whose name he did not ask for, slides two fingers inside him while he waits for some signal to continue.
Red, he thinks, and does not say. He swallows the words, packages them into a lockbox hidden inside his chest, where he knows he can access them if he really needs to. He can stop, he can stop. Any time he needs.
He arches his hips, bears down. Clenches the muscles of his abdomen so that he tightens around the fingers buried inside him.
Fuck, the man whispers. You look fucking good like this, baby.
And Cherry smiles, and pulls against the handcuffs so they dig into his wrists, and he lets the man take, and take.
It is easy to find them.
All he needs is eyeliner painted on a little too thick, clothes that fit a little too tight. A mouth set into a careful pout and eyes open wide like he’s never done this before, like he is exploring, as much as they are, a new and unfamiliar terrain.
They come to him with hungry eyes and wandering hands, these men who like the way the word Dom fits them because of the power that it implies, not the responsibility. They like the idea of him--nineteen and beautiful and hopelessly naive--strung out on their cheap sheets and creaking mattress.
The ones that are gentle with him, with hesitant touches, he smiles and thanks for their time. The ones that pinch at his skin, that move in close to him, that have to be told to back off with a glare from the club’s thoughtful owner--those are the ones who get his number slipped into their pockets.
He meets them at the closest bar to their apartment, with clothes that are easy to unravel and half a milligram of alprazolam sliding through his bloodstream.
What’s your name, baby? they ask him, with their hand already pushed up his skirts, resting on the inside of his thigh.
He leaves bright lipstick marks on the edges of his wine glass, and he smiles at them. You can call me Cherry Blossom, he tells them, and they laugh like they get the joke.
When they take him home, they fuck him without a condom on; it’s funny, how consistently they insist on this. They like to mark him up any way they can, he guesses--with hands around his neck, with a cane in their hands, with their come between his thighs. And he lets them; he lets them. This is the important part.
Fingers choking off his air, blows to the thinned-out skin of his ass, teeth sunk into his shoulder. He lets them. They carve themselves into the spaces in his body that are still bloody and ragged around the edges. He lets them.
In the morning, he leaves. He walks the whole way home.
(Of course he knows what he’s doing. Somewhere, he knows.
He knows because when he is in the bath, he scrubs himself clean until his skin is raw from the effort of it. Even on days when he does not find someone to take him home; even on days when he miscalculates and they are haltingly, infuriatingly gentle. He sinks into a bath that is just this side of much too hot and he pushes soap into the marks on his skin until it properly burns, and he feels at once fresh and new and ruined.
He knows because there have only ever been two things before this that have given him the same hollowed-out, crystallizing feeling. The knife hadn’t lasted long; the rush was too acute, the comedown too long. Starvation he still flirts with even now, the lightheaded joy of a real and physical emptiness too difficult to match in any other way. This, though, this comes achingly close.
He knows because he does not tell Kojiro for years.)
One of them, a fool who overestimated his skill in ropework, dislocates his wrist.
It is the most beautifully empty he has felt since Adam left.
Adam. The name scrapes the inside of his teeth. Come on, Cherry, you can take it. Pulling at his hair until tears bloom in his eyes. Good boy. Cherry’s hands push at him and he pushes back, pins him to the bed and buries himself in Cherry’s cunt. I love you, with his fingers halfway down his throat, I love you so fucking much.
When he dreams of Adam he wakes up gasping, clawing at his neck, and aching to come.
He gets himself off biting into the back of his own wrist, begging for something he can’t name. It isn’t enough, like that--it isn’t ever enough. He needs someone else. He needs unfamiliar hands on his hips. He needs something to pull out the rotten and festering pieces that are left inside him before they metastasize.
Maybe--
If Kojiro were here--
But he isn’t. He isn’t. Adam is in America, becoming a weapon for the Shindo family to wield; Kojiro is in Italy, becoming the person he deserves to be.
And Kaoru is buried somewhere deep underneath the soil. Cherry Blossom is a monster that is taking root in its place.
Sharp teeth, he thinks. Sharp teeth and bright red eyes.
He looks enough like him that it’s easy to pretend; especially through the haze of whatever it was Cherry watched slipped into his drink.
His consciousness ebbs and flows, that night. He knows there are hands on his skin. On his thighs. Something warm and heavy in his mouth, his head pushed and pulled to the rhythm of the worst blowjob he’s ever given in his life. His fingers are numb and his body is cold and he does not know if those two are related. There is make-up smeared across his face. There is laughter ringing in his ears. If he lets himself drift far enough, he can imagine someone calling him Eve.
In the morning, he extricates himself from sticky sheets, piling on as many clothes as he came with that are not now ruined. He has to call a cab this time; he doesn’t remember enough of where he is to walk himself home.
At home, when he brushes his teeth until his gums bleed, he reminds himself he didn’t have to take the drink, if he didn’t want to. He reminds himself that he lets them.
The first time someone tells him that Adam raped him, he laughs in their face.
He is twenty-four, nearly twenty-five by then, and it is his therapist, the one Kojiro forced him to see on penalty of being forced to talk to him about his feelings instead. She is a kind woman; a blunt woman. She listens to him speak, a story about a night that plays in his head when the anxiety rises in his stomach: Adam insisting that it was okay and that Kaoru’s parents wouldn’t hear, sighing with frustration as Kaoru bit his lip and worried over it, Adam’s hand finally slotting over Kaoru’s mouth and nose so that he would stop arguing, the sense-memory of it every time he finds it hard to breathe.
I don’t know why, he tells her with his hands firmly locked together, that memory is the one that keeps coming up. It’s far from the only time we had sex like that.
And then she tilts her head, and gives him a look that makes him clench his teeth tighter together, and she says, Are you aware that the encounter you described is rape?
And that’s when he laughs at her, like it is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. It is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard.
He was just, he says, and waves his hand vaguely, like that. Insistent. I didn’t-- try to make him stop. He was good at talking people into things, and I--I allowed that.
She is kind, and blunt, and patient. You told him that you didn’t want to have sex with him, she says, and he went through with it anyway.
It sounds so simple, when she says it. Sickeningly easy to see.
He shuts his eyes against it, and shakes his head. I don’t, he says. That isn’t.
She says, take all the time you need, and he still feels like there will never be enough.
It would be easier to live with himself if there was a good reason for it to end. If he’d come to the conclusion on his own that what he was doing was unsustainable, was dangerous, was not giving him what he desperately needed it to give him. If he, for once in his fucking life, did the right thing for the right reasons.
The truth of it is that, when Kaoru is three years older and twenty-two pounds lighter, Kojiro comes back.
The truth of it is that the old track--isolated, far enough from the city center that they do not have to worry about the last edges of evening light--closes down, and the replacement opens at midnight.
The truth of it is that the adrenaline rush, the anonymity of the night, the sharp and angry pieces of himself that he molds into whoever Cherry Blossom is--they find another home.