Chapter Text
take me to church (make me clean)
The word ritualistic comes to mind for the whole thing. Not taking into account the altar; the worshippers; the sequence of events. The sin.
This is the place they steer him to, without fail. They light the nerves under his skin, bendmoldbreak him into the shape they want, tell him hold steady there, it's hard, I know you can do it - until the whole world's on fire, he's burning and burning and burning (his legs his arms his mouth his fingernails his very core) and there's nothing left. Until they've ripped every last shred of thought. He's left spinning, whirling. So achingly desperate to be free.
He might be the closest to death he's ever been. Here, on this bed, with a dozen hands on him. Uncountable moral transgressions weigh heavily on his consciousness; he's not religious, but even he feels blasphemous with how many appendages have slid over his tongue, how low his glutted stomach sits, how they've peeled his knees further apart, spreading him wide. How many times he's begged, screaming behind a gag, rubber or digit or dick, choking and drowning until he comes.
Afterwards, he's embarrassed of his greed. But never to the extent of shame. They've kissed it out of him. (Groped it, slapped it, cuddled it, sucked it, fucked it, buried it into the ground.) Right now he's still caught in profane downslide, flying progressively higher and higher until they've reached cruising altitude.
He's waited so long to be empty and clean. Months to be a dry, juiceless husk.
The only instinct that remains is touch - to touch and be touched. Someone brushes up against him, and he warms, sluggish to curl around them. Every movement feels like he's been captured in a giant pit-trap of molten taffy. Somewhere above, softness drifts over him, cloudlike and wandering, cloth and lips both, until he's swaddled and boneless.
Toes flicker up his leg, leaving his skin goose-pimpled in their wake. Tilted back against a broad chest, his head flops, gyrates on its axis until it's cradled in the divot between shoulder and neck. He chases blurred scenttaste in the dip of Murasakibara's collarbone - how could God draw such a delicate swoop on such a muscled body? He imagines a muffled voice whispering directly into his ear, Hello, you - helloooo? Anybody home?, but his answer hovers, suspended, as teeth gnaw his jaw and neck, pinching hard. The pain is something delayed and remote.
Bubbles surface dreamily to the top of his brain as he's briefly airborne. In the next moment he catches hot steam, wet cedar, clean soap. Water peppers his feet as they settle him on the bench. Tepid heat lingers on the wood.
Someone arranges his shoulders back, ankles forward, so his head is under the spray. He's so gone, he thinks he could slip quietly under the water, into forever oblivion. His brain staggers a half-minute late, chasing reluctantly after the soapy circles being drawn on his skin. His mouth hangs lax and open, teeth and tongue throbbing, pulsing. Cocooned in the dark.
(We've got you, Kagami-kun.)
A hot exhale at the tip of his nose rouses him. He blinks hazily, half-expecting to see a will-'o-the-wisp hanging in front of him, but there's only a muted kind of gray behind the wet silk. Come on, Kagamicchi, turn this way, that's it, further articulated by familiar fingers folding his body. He follows the lure of Kise's mouth - higher thought still absent and not at all missed - and incentive of more praise. Yes, that's the way, you listen so well, so good, so sweet... At the edge of his senses, the muttering decays, muddies, melts into the hush of the water. Now that he's rested a little, he can drape himself a little further on the back of the bench, spread his knees -
(Yes. That's it.)
Someone probes him down there, but it's equal parts fingers and water. All the other tender bits of flesh join the chorus to be heard over the spray: lightning bugs in the dark. His lungs and stomach strain to expand, his jaw works to say the first coherent thing in hours - I can still do it - and just as quickly exhales in a single unintelligible hoooosh when the invasion is over almost as soon as it began.
(Still afloat?
Yes.)
It takes him an bewilderingly long time to realize the buoyancy of the water has turned into blankets and bodies. The bed has been stripped down but the faint pungency of saltbitter still lingers, along with the ozone lightning strike of intimacy.
Fingerprints present themselves in a slow drizzle of sensation, first drifting, a ghost of the shower down his back, then more insistently. Knuckles apply themselves shallowly, then harder into his neck and spine and shoulders and butt, digging for knots. At the exact moment each one is dispelled, oxygen is driven out of his body as he groans, then screams. His voice is a throaty, grated shadow of his courtside bellow. Elbows replace knuckles; he can hear himself gasping, harsh and quick, each exhalation rabbit-rapid and involuntary.
The words have all retreated with this last tide of satiation. All the clever adjectives, all the situationally correct phrases. Language, obsolete in freefall. Right now, lobotomized and vegetating, meaning and time are distant things.
Puzzling dichotomies: alone in his head yet connected in the moment; thoroughly used yet so content; bone-tired yet ready for more.
Between this heartbeat and the next, he becomes incrementally aware of the rest. The way the pores of his skin gape wide open. The irregular rise and fall of his sleeping nest. The high thread count of the sheets. A flail of Murasakibara's arm knocks the blindfold askew. Memory creeps back with sight.
The echoes of his name haunt him - these other that know everything that he is. They one-up his darkest ambitions. They match his deepest depravities. They - partners, brothers, extensions of himself.
He should be scared to be so exposed. He should cover himself and run away.
Instead, he'll stay. Because as much as they might think they've got a hold on him, in the end he knows: they're really the ones that belong to him.