Archive of Our Own

Ignoble to the end, a body laid out to rot on a sunken altar. Sacrament, sanctification, sacrifice, Shimano does it to him. Once a delirious threat cutting through city effervescence with feet barely touching the ground; sharpened edges and pale youth bound in graceful poise. Hadn't he been chosen by him, singled out and marked as his protégé? How quickly all naive braggadocio had fallen away like rotted meat on the bone as he had first knelt, head bowed in deference before him. How unassuming. How laughable. Hadn't he known, from the start? Hadn't he offered himself up to Shimano, allowed himself to be ceremonially slit from throat to navel, careless hands reaching inside and reshaping him into something of value? Selfhood slowly stripped away and reconstituted into a weapon, a knife, blood soaked and twisting in Shimano's grasp. A gleaming sepulchre of soft, white marble carved in his own delicate blossoms. A mausoleum housing the remnants of Majima Goro.

And still, with a razor-cut smile, Shimano does it to him. Turning it over in his mind, he plays the words back until they grow foreign on his tongue and all meaning is lost. Does, does, does, doing, to be done. Affected but never affecting, only the outer Otherness to the person bearing over him. No longer a subjective being of his own, but the boundary of Shimano's very self. An obverse. Fuck, fucking. To be fucked. A performance, an action, an execution. The noose that tightens, the axe that smiles, the soul demolished. Opened and intangible, offered up in sacrifice, he gives this willingly: crying out not in joy but in beatitude; the dreadful pleasures of being diminished to naught and subsumed unto him. Heart beating larghissimo, rallentando, wrenched free and held aloft to Shimano with arms drenched in blood-soaked absolution, sticky and sweet and dripping blackberry-thick down bone-white wrists. Time stutters and skips and slows and repeats, and repeats, and 

stops. 

It is the end of history, the age of materialism. Majima has been singled out and anointed, and he knows that he is the Real Thing.

He knows this. He knows this and, on his hands and knees in the night he whispers words of gratitude. But he cannot silence the question that irritates just below the surface of his skin; a knife that splits his tongue in words acrid and inexpressible. The tender abstraction that obscures the wetness, the putrescence, the chaotic disarray of sex. Intimacy, intimacy. Wanted and not wielded, expanding beyond the limits of himself instead of collapsing inwards. Intimacy. Intercession. Impatience. Want creeps through his veins: visions of rough fingers clasped, chapped lips trailing and biting down past the coarse hair below his navel. Eyes that meet his in trust and in need. Teeth, a tongue, a tiger framed in bamboo. Hands that would move with the contours of his body, recognising him, no longer in Otherness but in concert, an impenetrable extension without border. Unforgiveable tenderness.

Staccato grunts instead offer a stark riposte to softly strangled moans in a symphony of discordance. Narrow hips moulded against rough heat as he lowers his face down into sex-soaked sheets and presses his shaking body back, imperceptible fantasies of intimacy choking in the dark. Naked and exposed and it still isn't enough, can never be enough as he leans into the distant touch and sobs and begs to be stripped deeper until the want that pulses through his veins is cast out. Flesh unbound by a violence which whips and tears, a ferocity gathering in a riptide for which he is the eye of the storm. Silent as the world continues to move around him, pulling and wrenching at some far-away corner of what once was his body. A hiss escapes clenched teeth as disinterested hands worry against fresh bruises and catch at half-knit cuts; roughly manouevred and turned over with throat bared and the pale canvas of unblemished skin stretching out beneath an insouciant artist. The so-called weapon wrought vulnerable in glowing hues of mauve and garnet. A raw nerve, a convulsion.

Desecration of torn and stretched flesh, a defilement. Decimation begets ecstasy as surely as salvation in the end, as Shimano's sacrifice quietens and stills. It is not roiling passion and electricity beneath the skin but instead an emptiness that unsettles and overflows; uneasy peace among the infinite.