Work Text:
Predator, caught prey. Ryoushuu ashes her cigarette, staring down at that poor cicada-skin girl named Hong Lu at her feet. Knotted rivers of black hair brooking shoulders slack and scarred, barely hidden by unkempt clothes. At a glance, easy to tell: unraveling.
Pretty and imperfect, soaked in caustic left alone. There’s been a change in her, as Ryoushuu hoped.
Once precious in Hong Lu’s hands, her world of illusion. Soap bubble, polished silver, water’s surface. Pure and impenetrable, and all it took was a single cast stone. The dream of a possible smile popped, in pieces, muddied. What Hong Lu holds now she has no name for. Cut from an excess of neglect on the heels of too much attention. A gift from Ryoushuu called taught-to-want.
Just a touch of human ugliness and it’s made the girl sick. Revealed her rotting heart, the necrotic handprint proof of someone's attempt to paint a perfect son. Broad strokes too concerned with traditional beauty. Little more now than dotted lines to cut along.
Ryoushuu’s thoughts pause as: “Everything?” The girl repeats what she was asked to give. Less her own voice than it is Ryoushuu’s, echoing back from inside the hollow of Hong Lu’s body.
Soft as skin, leather gloved, Ryoushuu glides her hand from neck, to throat, to chin, to hush Hong Lu's lips. Tracing veins she answers low and graveled, "Everything." In no uncertain terms, all in the eyes, “Where you wake, you sleep. What: you eat, you wear, you think.” Curling her lips against the taste of ugly clarity, “When: you say yes, you say no, you’ve had enough, you need more.”
Harder her grip, dimpling Hong Lu's cheeks squeezed tight,
“Agree. Yes?” Ryoushuu makes the girl nod her head, half-tight ponytail bobbing loose. “No?” Then forces it back and forth, a pantomime of proper answers.
Eyes dissecting seconds. Ryoushuu watches how long it takes each word to reach the deep down of Hong Lu’s mind. Watches her understand the meaning of: skin, nerve, muscle, not her own.
One, two, three. Nod.
“P.E.T.” Her voice cigarette-burn soft, Ryoushuu offers an incision smile. Brushing touch against the girl’s scalp, correcting wandered strands back into place. Held like this, Hong Lu is the moments before a bonfire’s match, a surgery’s scalpel.
Lasting only forever before it ends, Ryoushuu steps away to fetch the first tool of the night. Eye drops, uncapped and held aloft. With hair taut as handle, she tilts back Hong Lu’s head. Dazed thing, mouth half open. Mannequin against Ryoushuu’s quiet commands. Dry glass dead stone, saline dropped. Blink, blink, and it leaves a glittering trail down cheek and chin.
Bony finger, trimmed nails. Ryoushuu reaches into Hong Lu. Touching silky places rarely seen, wet with false tears she cradles out the girl‘s unseeing eye. Thin film of inside-her shining like love by candle's light. Precious jade is dropped and drowned, clinking against the bottom of a peroxide bath.
Woven hemp underfoot speaks of no distance. Ryoushuu looms over the empty thing on the floor, and guides the girl’s head against her stomach. A sharing of warmth, an embodying. She shuts her eyes, exhales smoke, carding fingers careful through Hong Lu’s mess of tangles.
Sharpening in darkness an appetite for pain, more whet with each breath. There’s music under skin, sunset through veins, honey behind dry sockets. Hungry enough it all falls as heat between her thighs, and the time for tenderness ends.
At once, art of bodies in motion, Ryoushuu’s hand raised. Barely time to blink, painted across Hong Lu’s cheek with force enough the girl tumbles to the ground.
By uniform tie, yanked to kneeling once again. Hong Lu smiles because she doesn’t understand what’s happening. Ryoushuu smiles because she does.
Lip split, bleeding noise. Hong Lu starts, "Wh-" and does not finish. Snap of fast fabric, Ryoushuu catches the girl‘s next letters between pointer and thumb.
Taking as she pleases, heavy breath to paint her cigarette cherry red. Ashtray the girl’s pulled tongue, Ryoushuu stubs out cinders of smoke on hissing spit. A crimson pearl flower planted forever one swallow away from the heart.
Message clear enough even for naïveté: Shut your fucking mouth. Hong Lu only further speaks involuntary. Air forced from lungs as she’s ripped to her feet on several stumbling steps. Ryoushuu drives the ball of her foot against the back of the girl’s knee, slams Hong Lu’s head against hardwood. Bent over a table, bleeding.
Speed and brutality slipping under any time to process. Ungentle hands, violent over Hong Lu’s hips. Ryoushu rips the girl’s belt through loop, pulls down both pants and underwear in impersonal hurry. Time enough for click and hush of lighter, admiring the girl’s bare ass. Petite, barely round. Pale, paralleled with thin scars.
Bamboo, light. A cane fashioned for discipline. Favored by nobles, scholars, military men. Ryoushuu handles it with ease, and a flourish of her wrist splits both air and flesh.
“Ah!” Surprise from the girl’s lips, no tears shed, as her ass tenses. Ryoushuu observes an immediate change in her behavior. A sudden script-reading, Hong Lu brings up both hands to protect her head pressed against the table.
Four more strikes totaling five, across the back of Hong Lu’s pretty thighs. Her body tightens under each lash, but she knows not to fight it. Five strikes, totaling ten, and she digs fingers through her hair with every cane deep kiss. New wounds speckled blue and yellow, raised and dark where the red wants release.
Cane tossed aside. Cigarette held in teeth. Ryoushuu reaches, wrenching apart the girl’s hands to take python-tight fingerfuls of hair. Hong Lu’s voice gags on agony as she’s dragged to standing, to tripping, to pushed. Ryoushuu flattens the girl against the wall, shakes away the follicles her grip ripped free. Gives Hong Lu no time to think before:
Art and science, as they often do, intersect. The mechanics of a whip are poetry in motion. Lust and love only ever made sweeter by denial, and the motion is repeated here. Ryoushuu’s hand leaps forward, and pulls back. Explosive speed turns thin leather into teeth.
Picturesque, Hong Lu’s white work shirt splits, once, twice, thrice. Delicate blossoms painted across the fabric in vital fluid. The pieces missing display the skin beneath. Eaten just the same, knotted and raised with family heirlooms.
Again, Hong Lu has been here, somewhere else. She stays too still, hides both hand and elbow out of habit. Puts on an unwitting display of punishment intimacy, an everlasting love.
Ten, fifteen, twenty hits, and the honeymoon ends. Hong Lu‘s relationship with pain traps her in the past. Facing the wall she begins to beg, her voice coming in quiet spurts, salt and copper, “No,” little gasps and groans impossible to suppress, “please,” pleading with empty memory, “I’m sorry.” Her legs have started to shake, struggling to stay upright. Her chest heaves, each breath too heavy, too quick.
Cigarette nested in the crux of her fingers, Ryoushuu flicks a thumb against the filter to clear budding ash, before returning it to her lips. Dropping the whip, its purpose served, she bares down on the wounded doe. Blood in the water, each hand a maw, flaying confettied clothes from skin. Arms jerked through sleeves, buttons ripped out of place, pants long since thrown aside.
Naked and trembling, Hong Lu palms herself to try and hide her fragile places. But still she smiles, yet to cry, "Thank you." She says to someone else, "Thank you, thank you," that irritating habit of hers. Regurgitating words she's been taught to repeat, stripped of meaning.
Ryoushuu clicks her tongue, bites her hand into the flesh of Hong Lu’s throat. Puppeteers the girl towards the nearest chair, and pushes her down. Forces the entire weight of her body to sit on the razor wire of fresh wounds. Hong Lu gasps, squeezes her eyes shut, digs her nails into the arms of the seat.
The muscles of her stomach strain, the beading sweat rivulet drips. What little shame she has hides her legs together. Arm, throat, ligament and tendon cord tight beneath skin. She's almost beautiful like this, almost real. But, while she writhes in place, she still begs someone else: “I’ll be good.” Her face forms a smile. “Please.” The focus of her eye jitters, in a dream. A void through which Ryoushuu nearly sees the shadow of the one Hong Lu pleads with for release.
Cigarette spent, cast aside, she strikes the girl open handed. Fully. Bodily. Right foot back driving force, hips turning to torque. Hong Lu jerks in place, her hair undone falling like a curtain. Cheek white-pink, nose bleeding. Pulled by hair upright, again struck, again, again. Until Ryoushu's palm glitters with blood, until Hong Lu stops smiling.
Rolling her wrist, Ryoushuu re-lights her vice. In beautiful silence, she appraises the girl's limp body. Painter's habit, minds eye applying in layers of texture an ingredient list of pigments needed to capture her subject. For Hong Lu:
Cobalt Blue
Arsenic Green
Lead White
Vermillion Mercury
Varnished to gloss in formaldehyde, forever.
Exhaling smoke, thoughts alive with resin and dye, Ryoushuu first takes from the table a handful of bamboo sticks. Each no thicker than a carpenter's nail, no less pointed than a seamstress' needle. Second, weight hefted and tested. A tack hammer, suited perfectly for tap, tap, tapping something sharp into something soft.
Next to rattled Hong Lu, she kneels. Arranging each stick on the floor, Ryoushuu's hand then swallows Hong Lu's own.
Sweet skin giving against leather, as one finger is coerced straight, flat. Its tip crowned by a simple scar, circular.
Against that same scar, Ryoushuu perches the point of a bamboo stick. She raises her hammer, and with a practice-makes-perfectly precise strike, the nail tip is driven in. The sudden invasion makes Hong Lu come alive.
She inhales, fast, hard, the ice in her veins audible. All that air soon spent begging, "Please, I—"
Voice cracking frantic, punctuated by the sound of metal on bamboo, the sound of her fingers interior forced to accommodate milli-, centi-, decimeters more. "It hurts." Tap, tap. "Please, it hurts." Tap, tap. "I don't want this anymore!"
A statement of desire. Much faster than expected. An individual I implied, inchoate. Hong Lu’s first real step taken beyond the red chamber of her flesh. Waking from the dream, the entire purpose of tonight’s painting. Ryoushuu pauses in her work. Underhands the hammer back to the table.
Fluid in motion, she rips the bamboo from Hong Lu’s finger, stands to tower over her. Simple stick traded for a blade. She pulls the girl from the chair, forces her to the ground. Her body unable to support its weight, pain in thighs, back, fingers, flat on her front.
Freshly born thing, Hong Lu is a shivering moth, spider-caught. From toe to shoulder, her form is eaten up by billowing yukata cotton. Ryoushuu sits next to her, pulls the girl into her lap. Stomach pressed to back. Blood and sweat slick between them.
Reflected in the knife-mirror, by fickle candlelight: Ryoushuu holds Hong Lu by the throat, forcing her to acknowledge the blade inches from her face. Recognition key, she needs Hong Lu to be thinking of herself, and what she wants. She needs Hong Lu to be thinking of something sharp, something scary. She needs Hong Lu to be thinking of her most intimate skin severed and scraped away.
Chest against diaphragm, held breath intimately felt, pulse in her ears. Ryoushuu lowers the knife, and dips it between Hong Lu’s legs. Edging it closer, closer towards the terminus of her hips. There rests a cruel scar, jagged from mons to taint, terminating in a little pink slit. All it takes is a half press of cold steel, and
Hong Lu shrieks, terror raking through the raw flesh of her throat. She tries to flee, pushing against floor with weak feet, her hurting hands grabbing at anything within reach. Breaking down into uncontrolled sobs. Hyperventilating, to pieces.
At once, Ryoushuu removes the knife from the scene. Hushing, hushing, pulling Hong Lu closer, closer. Pressing the girl’s head against her heartbeat. Holding her steady in the storm. Letting Hong Lu cling on tight as she needs, as long as it takes to release a lifetime of tears unshed.
Her crying never truly stops, a single night not enough to bleed out decades of sorrow. But there are periods in which she calms, somewhat: her fever pitch wailing settles into a sniffle. In these moments Ryoushuu takes the time to clean her up.
Methodical, meditative. Wash with warm water, sanitize, bandage anything egregious. Always she keeps a hand on Hong Lu as she moves from step to step. After years of practicing her craft, Ryoushuu’s learned to take good care of her favorite tools.
Wholly real and hurting, Hong Lu is lifted and placed like porcelain upon the futon. As before, covered all except a thigh. Ryoushuu takes and places a handful of items. Syringe, needle, box and vial titled: E.V. After exacting measurements, she picks a spot on the upper third of Hong Lu’s thigh, and the moment passes after a prick.
Ryoushuu finishes tucking Hong Lu in, and cups her cheek, stares into her eye, and hurts Hong Lu in a way more lasting than anything she’s done yet.
“You didn’t deserve what they did to you.” Ryoushuu strokes the weeping girl’s face. “You were just a child.” She says with her body, in a way only a mother could,
You are safe here, in my arms.