Ascot
Yohji/Mamoru. PG-13.
Sometimes the chains break, but the links remain.
2005 | 1210 words
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Scarves hold in marks of secrets no longer worth keeping. Mamoru ties them in complicated knots he’s learned in complicated times, and he’s given up hopes of a simpler life way too long ago to bother being amused by small lies or huge ironies.
Sometimes the knot is too tight, and he has to untie everything and take a closer look in the mirror before starting over. Usually on days like these, there are not only the common, ordinary scratches of jagged nails on his hips and purple bruises of nicotine-stained teeth on his shoulders, but also the clear, glaring red marks of long skinny fingers around his neck, burned on his skin like iron claws heathen in flames. On days like these, he he ties his pristine white scarves with simpler, looser knots, but he still has trouble breathing all day long, feeling his throat clench around each and every intake of air. It hurts, but if he stops and thinks of all the ways he’s been hurt before, this feels almost comfortable. He never stops, and he never thinks, and with time he learns to love this pain, much like he’s learned to love all the others.
Sometimes he looks and looks, turns his head in every direction in front of the mirror searching for marks, scars, dark spots, anything. Still the mirror shows nothing, and the more he stares at himself, the less he is sure what exactly he is looking for. On days like these, he spends long, slow, precious minutes of his tight schedule making beautiful, perfectly smooth aristocratic knots that make him look proper and respectable, but that never, never seem to be tight enough. He spends the whole day tying and untying, tightening and retightening until he’s almost suffocating, and even then it’s just never quite tight enough.
He spends too much time and money on couture and grooming nowadays. Tailored suits, designer coats, Italian shoes - it’s not as much vanity as a feeble, weak attempt at imposing some respect on his employees by at least looking like he has any idea of what he is doing with his life. The supposedly mature, responsible man in him feels important and successful shielding himself on clothes that cost in each piece more than the average salary man makes in a year. The reclusive, angry boy in him feels a little vindicated seeing those clothes ripped open with enough fury to send buttons flying across the room, and thrown in any direction like dirty old rags by impatient cold hands that in a second are pushing him naked onto the bed or pressing him against the nearest wall without a care for what the tag on his coat says. Those same cold hands that after tearing away his equally expensive scarves, sometimes ripping chunks of fine silk away in their hurry to undo the fancy-named knots he’s tied with such dedication, print their mark on his neck with passion, for good or worse, like a token of affection - or loathing; a souvenir to be remembered by.
He knows this could kill him, but he thinks it won’t. There has to be some kind of master plan guiding this whole mess, and while he doesn’t know what awaits him at the end of his downward spiral to hell only knows where, he likes to think that he hasn’t come all this way only to die a pointless, pathetic mid-coital death. That’s why he lets himself be pushed, pressed, scratched, bitten, marked, closed in on until he is just about out of time and oxygen to admit maybe he’s wrong about this master plan thing - but by then, those hands start to unclench, those cold cold fingers give up this farce, and he starts to breathe again, vaguely wondering what for. He knows this could kill him, but he’s not weak enough to admit that sometimes he wished it did.
He always stays a while after they’re done. He could say it’s common courtesy, that you don’t simply eat all you can and leave the table just like that. He could say it’s a matter of hygiene, after all it’s counterproductive to spend millions of yens in good clothes and put them back on while still covered in sweat and sperm, not all of it his own. He could even say he stays because on a deeper, quieter, maybe unconscious level, he still cares. But the truth is, he stays because he’s never been told to leave. And, with time, he learns to enjoy staying, much like he’s learned to enjoy a good fabric, western meals, and the feeling of holding people’s lives in his hands. He stays because it’s nice to appreciate the silence of the night and hear the subtle shifts in someone’s breath as they fall asleep. Because it feels slightly better to leave someone’s side by a warm bed in the middle of the night than lying alone in a cold one all night long. Because he’s always been too young and too innocent and no one’s ever told him what it feels like to take a good shower after some good sex, then smoke a good cigarette and have a good drink by the balcony of someone else’s apartment at three in the morning - but now he knows, and he still thinks he should’ve been told about life’s insignificantly small pleasant moments like this a long time ago. And maybe - just a tiny little maybe - he even stays because every time he leaves it feels like breaking the chain, and hell knows there are enough things broken in his life already.
He stays, but he also leaves. It’s the natural flow of things, he’s learned; you come, you go. He comes and he goes, but before he goes, he always remembers to sit back and stare a while at that sleeping face too hard to forget, to run his finger through the long messy curls that are no longer there and he never had the chance to touch like this, to kiss what could have been the love of his life goodnight and goodbye. He knows he’ll be coming back in a day or two - but then again he doesn’t know if he’ll still be alive in a day or two to come back or not, and he’s said so many farewells which became goodbyes before that he figures it’s easier to say goodbye already and leave matters attended to. His schedule is just too tight nowadays to afford open endings, even if he can still afford the reruns.
He doesn’t sleep much anymore, and not at all on those nights he comes back home from the bed he shouldn’t be visiting. He’s never tired when he gets home, but he is curious, and sometimes angry at everything in general and nothing in particular. He won’t bother lying in bed and staring at the ceiling until the sun comes, but he’ll sit by a large mirror, staring in fascination at the marks over his body, searching for answers that aren’t there. Trying to choose which scarf he will use in the morning, and what kind of knot he’ll be tying these worthless secrets with this time.
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