JERICHO ● SEPTEMBER 2025 EVENT/TDM

[uruz]

TDM & EVENT: JERICHO

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Prologue: New Characters

You've been plagued with a reoccuring dream, as of late. Every time you sleep, the dream returns to you.

It always begins the same way: As a breath held for too long. As a pressure at the base of your spine. A silence that presses against the skin like confession, like prophecy. A ripple moves through your bones. A tide builds and pulls at your feet, familiar by now. You dream of a black, soundless wave, thick like oil and starlight, swelling across the horizon line. You've seen the wave before, countless times, always rising. With every night, it never reaches you. You always seem to wake before it does . . . That is, until tonight.

The wave moves slow, deliberate— like something ancient and alive. And when it finally crashes, there is no harsh impact. Only warmth. Only submersion. Rather than drowning, you are being claimed with saltwater that's sweet with myrrh. The darkness embracing you pulses with desire. Then, a voice envelops you.

"Come home."
It dribbles with honey-like promise, like a truth you've always known, whispered now from within your marrow more like temptation than a request.

"You are mine. You always were."
The voice offers purpose. Worship. Belonging. And when you wake . . . You wake changed, with a mask on your face you did not choose. Elegant. Sacred. Too important to remove. You have been given a gift. A new beginning.

Welcome home, new Vessels.

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Sink Down Like Precious Stones

( content warnings: drowning, body horror )

Vessels awaken within the dreamscape as the black wave recedes from their skin like velvet falling off the bone, their masks in place over their eyes and left afloat in the watery expanse. All around them, the ocean stretches infinite and lightless— so still it mirrors the sky above, indistinguishable from the void. Far in the distance, massive obsidian walls curve inward, enclosing this vast seascape like a forgotten temple basin. And there, at the far horizon, one glow pierces the dark: a low-burning fire flickering within a half-sunken structure of impossible architecture— arched, ribbed, as though built from marble and cathedral glass.

This is a test, and it begins with belief.

Those with unwavering faith— whether in Sleep, another god, or even themselves— will find the surface beneath their feet holds firm. The sea becomes glass, and they may rise, and walk. But those adrift in doubt begin to sink. Precious stone creeps over their skin. Joints stiffen. Flesh cracks. Breath slows. It is not death, but it is close and might as well be hell. Your only salvation lies in your own conviction . . . Or the mercy of another Vessel who happens to walk.

Those who drown will not die. They will loop this moment— sinking, blackness, return, sink again— until belief takes root in some way. Alternatively, they may awaken in a later dreamspace . . . Changed.

NOTES:

• Pale white fish as well as glowing jellyfish may be encounted. The fish stare at vessels as they drown, and jellyfish may leave behind a shock that could temporarily stop the process of crystalization. But only temporarily— and their stings are excrutiating.

TOKEN EFFECTS:

• Magic becomes volatile— spells flicker, overcharge, or fizzle unpredictably when cast on or near the ocean.
• When you cast, your veins glow from beneath the skin, but not with light. It's writhing. Like something trapped under glass.
• When channeling magic, your mouth may fill with brine and blood.

OFFERING EFFECTS:

• The water responds emotionally— thrashing with fury or calming with yearning depending on the Offering's state of mind.
• The sea amplifies desire and instinct, making base emotions harder to suppress— rage, hunger, longing all churn just beneath the surface.
• The black water feels too warm, too alive, clinging to the body like memory; any stillness invites visions of Sleep's embrace, both reverent and consuming.

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You Taste Like New Flesh

( content warnings: body horror, psychological horror, compulsion, unreliable reality )

The ocean path ends at a palace carved of pearl and spun silk, impossibly perched where water meets nothingness. Whether you have traversed the black sea on trembling feet or simply awaken seated at an impossibly long table, it makes no difference. You are here now, and welcomed, suddenly in attire fit for a gala. Around this table sit countless Dream-Vessels, many silent and still, faces unreadable in the flickering candlelight wearing generic, six-eyed masks. The table stretches beyond sight, arching beneath creeping vines that twist like ancient veins overhead, blooming with strange blossoms that beat with energy. Flames dance atop dozens of candles— some burn on brass holders, others hover, like fireflies caught mid-flight, their shadows flickering and shifting with an otherworldly rhythm. Around you, phantasmal forms shimmer on pedestals: Sleep's ancient Guardians are eternalized through memorial, monstrous and magnificent, lost to time yet enshrined in reverence. On the highest pedestal stands a still living One, silent and watching the feast with somber eyes. Sleep's voice whispers in your ear, encouraging a glance to, perhaps, see what you may become.

"Feast, My Dear Vessels. Until you taste like New Flesh."

The foods before you don not come unmeddled with. Each bite pulls memories from your bones to the surface— moments buried or erased, but these are not just yours. The banquet feeds on shared history, stirring secrets tangled between you and the others here. To eat is to open a door: to risk awakening something dormant, to invite others inside your buried truths, to forge bonds or betrayals that can never be unseen.

Eton Mess: Crushed meringue, tangled cream, and berries that bleed like bruises when bitten. Sweetness melts quickly, leaving your tongue cold. As you eat, a memory rises— but you don't experience it alone. The person nearest you sees what you see, hears what you hear, feels what you felt. Together, you can alter one key detail, and that change ripples outward, shifting how you both remember the event.

Deviled Kidneys: Spiced and seared, the metallic richness clings to your mouth, as if tasting old blood. Eating summons the echo of a painful or violent memory, but your partner experiences it with you.

Roasted Lamb in Mint Sauce: The sweetness of the meat is cut by mint sharp enough to sting the throat. Your act of consumption awakens a craving, but not in you— in the Vessel sharing this dish. They feel an inexorable pull toward your memory, even without knowing what they seek. The bond persists until the craving is confronted.

Honey Scouse: A thick, golden stew heavy with warmth, but beneath the sweetness, something cloying curls around the edges. Every shared spoonful spreads a slow, creeping influence between you and your partner: intrusive visions, subtle compulsions, small lapses in agency. Neither of you can tell whose thoughts belong to whom.

Starpit Fruit: Plum-sized and faintly glowing, the juice leaves your fingertips dusted in silver, like handling starlight. When bitten, the fruit releases the memory of a forgotten wish, not to you but to the person beside you. They see it clearly— and know exactly what you once wanted most, even if you had buried it.

Marigold Brandy: A golden spirit served warm, glowing faintly as though sunlight has been trapped inside the glass. When lifted, it releases a soft, floral scent. The first sip draws you and your partner into a shared burst of joy— a memory that makes you swell with happiness. The sensation is so immediate, so electric, that when the memory breaks, your bodies ache to move, to speak, to draw more positivity to light. You may feel an irresistible pull to get up and dance on the wide palace floors, even if no music is playing . . . And if others nearby drink as well, the effect multiplies.

Saints Breath Chalice: A dark, wine-thick cordial served in tarnished silver cups etched with symbols that shift when stared at too long. The liquid smells faintly of frankincense and something sweeter— blood-warm and alive. Drinking it floods you and your partner with the overwhelming sensation of being inside someone else's celebration, a memory that belongs to neither of you: a vast mass of black, with branching antlers and six, glowing red eyes. It reaches to sink its claws into your chest as she sings: One. Beloved. We were meant to be. It is impossible to tell whether you're witnessing joy or manic worship. There is chanting you cannot understand but somehow already know, drums that sync with your heartbeat until you can feel nothing else. Your limbs begin to twitch, then sway, then move without conscious thought, drawn into a dance you do not remember learning. If more than two people drink, your movements synchronize perfectly, your breath matching theirs, until the room seems stop to watch.

The table awaits.

NOTES:

• Feasting becomes addictive. The more a character eats, the harder it is to stop. Gluttony may cause physical consequences: nosebleeds, twitching fingers, warping speech, uncontrollable confessions, or dripping nectar from their mouths.
• Those who refuse to eat at all begin to starve in a dream-sense: they lose color, smell burning, and feel the weight of Sleep's gaze. Her wrath isn't immediate— but it grows the longer you reject the feast. She takes offense.

TOKEN EFFECTS:

• Each spell cast after eating releases parasitic energy— manifesting as flowers, thorns, parasitic insects or rot— either from their own body or from someone they recently touched.
• Casting warps your limbs temporarily: too many joints, fingers curl the wrong way, nerves burn like wires.
• Touching others leaves sigils burned into their skin. These will briefly carry over into the waking world during next month's event. Runecasters will get the innate feeling that this symbol has a meaning summed up as "The Night Does Not Belong To God". How they interpret that is up to them.

OFFERING EFFECTS:

• The act of devouring awakens an overwhelming desire, often physical, but sometimes emotional or spiritual. This desire clings to another Vessel at the table, creating obsessive attachment or aggression.
• The more they eat, the more their monstrous traits subtly emerge.
• Consuming another Vessel's memory (if shared or touched) grants a brief glimpse of their deepest fear or weakness.

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There's Something In The Way You Lay

( content warnings: sexual content, voyeurism, body modification, omegaverse traits, loss of agency )

Beneath its pearlescent halls, beyond the banquet of flickering candles and dream-Vessels who eat in hollow silence, a spiral staircase winds downward. Its steps are damp and velvet-slick. The further you descend, the warmer the air becomes— humid, cloying, thick with the scent of sweat, salt, and incense. The sounds reach you first: Slaps, gasps, the wet chorus of bodies and perverse intimacy. Laughter, muffled sobs, the echo of whispered names long forgotten. At the base lies a corridor of "private" rooms. Their doors swing open with dreamlike invitation. Inside, the scenes unfold: past dream-Vessels lost in tableau— arched backs, bitten lips, mouths open in prayer or obedience. Some are alone, coiled in worship. Others tangle in groups, indistinguishable where one body ends and another begins. Vines bloom across the ceilings, watching. The walls glisten with breath. You see their faces, but you can't quite distinguish what or who they are. You may not remember choosing a role, but the dream has chosen for you. α or Ω— and with the naming, your body changes. There is no shame here, only devotion made manifest. This is how Sleep is worshipped now: through cruelty and surrender, through the giving and the taking of flesh.

NOTES

• Masks may optionally offer a sort of glamour for Vessels who wander into these chambers— they will not be able to recognize each other. How much of that, whether it be appearance, voice, and so on, is up to you.
• Past dream-Vessels perform for no one, eyes vacant, movements perfect, as if only a ghost of a memory. Player characters may interact with them and even partake in intimacy with them, but be warned: they are emotionally absent and may cause symptoms of succumbence that could be remedied with a proper, player-character tether.
• Tools hang on the walls: Rods of all sizes, slick with heat. Collars that hum with low, seductive voltage. Blindfolds that intensify physical contact, There's no need for cuffs or chains when there are vines that seem to respond to the α party's mood— tightening, flowering, or reaching for skin. You are free to come up with your own items.
• α perks:: Instinctive claiming (done through biting, rubbing, branding, etc), an almost predatory focus and obsession for those who interest them, pack gravity (the ability to attract one or more vessels at once), emitting a scent that ignites heat/rut in others, darker urges surge and a commanding voice.
Ω perks: High pain tolerance, instinctive yielding, emotional synchrony with those being watched, self-lubricating, hypersensitive, scent tracking, intense need to please or be filled emotionally, physically, and spiritually. When touched, glowing runes bloom across the skin.

TOKEN EFFECTS

• Spells cast during acts of intimacy may provoke a heightened sensation of euphoria for both caster and whoever is affected by the spell.
• Magic may manifest as misty appendages— extra hands, tongues, eyes, etc.
• Divine energy becomes volatile when passed through the body— ecstasy may border on agony, or vice versa, and Tethering becomes impossibly euphoric.

OFFERING EFFECTS

• Flesh becomes malleable mid-act— bones bending, jaws unhinging, skin blooming open, etc.
• Animalistic traits emerge: tails, claws, growls, tentacles, scent glands— all begging to be used.
• Feeding and Tethering are indistinguishable— hunger becomes worship, and worship becomes need.

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I am not worthy

( content warnings: body horror, violence, gore, parasitic/invasive feeding, death )

Wherever you are, the palace begins to rot. First slowly, then all at once: vines swell with black fluid, splitting at the seams. They burst from beneath marble tiles, coil up pillars, slither across frames and vacant thrones like arteries choking a heart. The candlelight flickers. One by one, the flames throughout the palace float upward . . . And die. No smoke. No warning. Just wet silence. Then the Dream-Vessels begin to fall. They do not scream as they do. They collapse like marionettes, limbs askew. Their flesh splits open along wounds that should not exist— a rip at the neck, teeth marks prying open the ribcage, a bite that swallows half a torso. Bones jut like sculpted ivory. Entrails slither across the floor like garlands. Some burst mid-air, as if the dream demands spectacle. Others fold in on themselves until all that's left of them is a mound of flesh.

"I am not worthy."

One voice. Ten. A thousand—layered, glitching, sweaty. It echoes from the walls, the bodies, the seams in the floor. The corpses twitch in time with the chant, jerking violently. Some snap backwards, eyes wide, jaws unhinged. Others explode— blossoming in gore, raining viscera. From the heaving pile of ruined Dream-Vessels, something forms.

It lurches into being: stitched from tongues, teeth, torsos. Weeping. Wailing. Worshipping. A monstrosity of raw flesh and faith: all failures made meat. Its eyes (are they eyes?) blink out. Arms claw outwards, too many to count. Its scent is of copper, sweat, and sorrow.

When The Abomination chooses to feed, it seeks not flesh, but the softest rot inside you. An appendage uncoils from its writhing mass and unhinged jaw— veined, slick, and trembling like a violated root. It drives itself into your mouth, splitting your lips with obscene tenderness, and sinks deep into your throat, locking you still.

What it draws out is not blood. It siphons your doubts, your fears, your most secret self-hatred. Your inadequacy. Every buried shame. Your hate. Your negativity. Every flinch of unworthiness. Every moment you believed yourself unlovable, unseen, too small. It gorges on what you hide from even yourself, and the more you try to resist, the sweeter your sorrow becomes. The last thing it takes is your life force, and then your viscera, leaving you wilted and shrivled like a hollow log.

This death is violating and feels painfully slow. You're drained raw of your vitality until you're but a brittle husk that breaks to dust in the wind. It seems near impossible to destroy, always reforming into bits and pieces left smudged behind. Perhaps your best bet it to run, or attempt to wake yourself up from this nightmare.

One's voice repeats in choked sobs: I am not worthy.

NOTES:

• Wounds from the beast linger. You may wake bleeding or marked.
• If devoured, characters will awaken the following month extremely fatigued during the first 3-5 days of the month. They may also sporadically rigurgitate black sludge. Characters who die and are already in the game may requesta plot clue, that will be a vision your character will dream of before awakening.

TOKEN EFFECTS

• Magic recoils violently when used on The Abomination, backfiring with psychic screams or ripping into your flesh.
• Your hands glow uncontrollably, burning what you touch— even those you love.
• Magic becomes hungry; it demands pieces of your body to function. A tooth. A nail. A rib (and so on).

OFFERING EFFECTS

• The rage it stirs in you is monstrous. You begin to shift uncontrollably— flesh blooms, bones crack under strain.
• Your body begins moving before you decide to. Twitching toward The Abomination, and toward the scent of despair.
• During the chaos, you may develop a fixation with another Vessel's flaw. You can smell it on them. It entrances you . . . To the point that you may feel the urge to feed them to The Abomination.

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OOC NOTES

➤ Welcome to Somnia's second TDM, which doubles as our third gamewide event!

➤ This TDM is considered game canon. You are free to have your character remember as many details as possible.

➤ Only new characters are free to experiment with the Vessel options to your liking; this is a dreamscape, so multiple/different situations for you to really test which option you like most is possible. Current characters must remain as their chosen Vessel type unless you requested a switch, which can be done on the Taken page.

➤ All TDMs take place within a dreamscape, meaning characters can interact with the setting without needing to apply. Come have fun with us!

➤ Veteran players, I ask to please refrain from making post-event threads for the time being! We have some important information to take into account in next month's event when characters are slated to "wake up". At the very least, please wait for the information to be offered on the next plotting post. Thank you everyone for your patience!

➤ Please comment on the TDM's INVITE TL if you are a new player interested in joining the game, but don't yet have an invite. Current players or the mod may reach out to extend an invite. Once you've got one, please don't forget to comment on the Invite page so you may properly link it in your reserve and app.

➤ Questions? Please direct them to the designated questions comment linked below!

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[hallowedly]

( Sumeragi Subaru's heart, listen to its stuttered madness, cacaphony and necromancy twined in primitive hide-and-seek: now you glimpse it, now you don't. Beneath Seishirou's chasing hand, half lingering, half fluid, it blossoms and wilts with all the strapping vitality befitting a young swooning heiress of delicate pedigree, or the genealogically manicured 13th head of a clan intent on its own dignified extinction.

Subaru coughs; Seishirou recedes, the afterthought equivocations of his body belatedly rejecting the violence thrust upon him. You should sit. But then, they both hace game afoot, and Subaru-kun can only be depended to linger accommodatingly comatose for his irregularly scheduled frisking for another tens of seconds. Less than, Seishirou resolves, and it's in the luck of things when the next diligent pass of his hand reveals — ribs likely bruised, a flank emaciated, the coastal swell of a hip's protrusion — ...the timid, defanged cut of Subaru's anonymous lighter, inspidity made steel. Really, a man of a certain age should have resigned himself to the wasted fortune behind a Dupont.

But far from Seishirou, bereft in the face of Subaru's abrupt pivot for handsiness to criticize. No, he is more deeply entrenched in tallying the private faults that landed him in this sophisticated geometry of improbable shapes: first, Sumeragi Subaru was permitted alive, then well, then in possession of working limbs, and in proximity. Then, the sickly trickle of Seishirou's magic is a poisoned well craftily refilled with the synthetically filtered water of foreign reserves Seishirou has taken great pains not to tap, for the indignity. They've chained away the better part of himself, his birthright, and there will be blood to oil hands and slick their glass bridges and overfill their seas, and it will be due, his due, the clan's wont. And it will be done, but that isn't the day's trouble.

No. That is Seishirou, clasped like the hero of a romance novel, collapsed to ravish his maiden — one hand arrested midair with his (his) confiscated lighter, the other askew to support his weight, cracked down on bruised-battered glass. Depriving him, notably, of the means to smash Sumeragu Subaru's head in — were the instinct not already remarkably desiccated.

There are words to be had and traded and sharpened into stakes, and revelations, and change he has no appetite to seed, let alone sow — and so, he waits.

The gaping maws of tension between them grow aching, taut. Click and the cage snaps around them. He waits again.

Then, Subaru yields first. I killed you. )

...did you? ( He smiles, slow and electric, charged. Lets his hand with the lighter drag down, and waits once more for the thunder of Sumeragi Subaru's heart, and the storm brewing between them.

It breaks. ) What a thing to do.

[sacral]

I — [ What a thing to do. ] ...yes, I did.

[ First: solidity. Wholeness despite his conviction, a perpetual sore spot between enemies, though he has since learned his perception wasn't everything. Subaru half-expects this dream to melt into an oily prism of familiarity that only his lens can scry, a memory masqueraded by the temporal lapse in his power. But he is still Sumeragi, and this is no ablution. Nothing washes off. Subaru is left with a complete sternum that doesn't shatter in his grasp, an atrium running beneath muscle, complete catacombs, breathing, tension held between the ribcage he'd torn to pieces and spilled everything out of. In search of what? This?

A scolding?

As if he was sixteen and missed a homecooked supper (the last three suppers, in truth), as if he bowed in supplication over the phone again, loathe to display rank, as if he'd stayed up for days, as if he'd snubbed a curation of desserts again...

What a thing to do.

He gets ahead of himself. First: solidity. Second: killing intent. Third: he has never held his heart in his hands save the one instance where he knew nothing about what to do with it. The better part of his instincts flare as anxiety about where his fingers clasp, rumpling a shirt not so easily pressed in the shadow of someone's dreaming. Every synapse unfurls, refusing to be stymied by grace or poise — paranoia sweeps static and overwarm across the back of his neck. The intimacy of again and not again causes him to suddenly wrench himself backwards, the wet print of his judgment made less saintly by his vulgar curiosity splayed like half a pair of wings across his chest. Two-pronged, the backs of his knuckles slap against the inside of Sakurazuka Seishirou's wrist, casting the hand with the lighter from overhead.

And make no mistake, his curiosity is obscene, the now-hallowed ground on which he surely sits too saturated to seed or sow anything. It's an overeager mismanagement of expectation, a hand too kind to tend properly, for it treats all things the same.

Treated all things the same, other cultivars left to rot. In that favor, he finds sickness finally rising. The lighter becomes consolation. ]

You remember it.

[ One thing Subaru has never shied from is his gaze, the now imperfect mirror of it caught by disfigured ocean light. ]

[hallowedly]

( He remembers: mouth mad and mutinous with brightness, and red, red noosing his collar, wept down from a wound left wanting finite conclusion. One [1] brutal exsanguination plus one [1] years-long blood feud should have tallied the two [2] stranded in mislaid grief. But then —

Fleetingly, between bursts of silent simmer, the glass bridge fractures in spider webs of prickling pressure points. Resolidifies with the knife's twist of an exhalation. Careful, careful. To drink of doubt is to drown. How poetic.

There's no artistry in the failure of bones, the slow reconfiguration of two knives in their sheath: he falls beside Subaru in limp extravagance, legs splayed out to full, taut length and the click-clack of the lighter, baring its teeth. He thumbs flimsily at his cigarette pack, pulls out a stick — only to flinch at the wet on his pad, the casual betrayal of corporate armor. They must have bathed when Seishirou did: a bead string of sullen amniotic moments awash have conspired to thieve from one hapless man his cancerous relief.

This day brims with audacity. The cut of his glare on the spoiled cigarette could eviscerate. He doesn't set it out down, quietly accusing. Lets it rethink its wrongs. )

I don't have your memories or answers. ( For a moment. For a change. ) I don't even have a smoke.

[sacral]

[ Another obscenity, to luxuriate in a bridge that has learned the art of threat. Yet Subaru stills in his nausea and new fortune, their limbs thrown constellate into some mysterious other hexagram. He sits. He finds the supple violence of a man denied his addictions... normal. Sopping, unadorned, bloodless dissatisfaction, though not lacking in effort. It's a serrated look that causes him to avert his gaze; he knows how quickly the bloodlessness can change. First he looks to the star-streaked fish below, then up and out. Calm saturates sick, an ebb and flow of relief he doesn't dare desecrate for meaning yet.

No memories, no answers. No way of knowing, yet knowing without daring to ask. Just gloss and foam, pallidity sharpened by the height of the giant bowl they've stumbled into. Subaru can't recall the last time he didn't have provocation straining in all the places he'd ill-fit it to. Beneath him, the glass splinters further mend.

He'd killed Sakurazuka Seishirou, and here Seishirou-san sits. ]

There's a shore ahead. [ Far, but corporeal. Perhaps as inhospitable as the void sea, but at least it'd have newness to garner favor over the egregious sin of wet. Subaru's lips press down, then release — he holds his hand out for the pack of cigarettes. ] You might fare a better look there.

[hallowedly]

( A shore. A final destination. The careful calculation of Sumeragi Subaru breaking for a run down roads labyrinthine, hoping with the fox's hope that he might lair up, belly to floor and be a dead and silent thing, and avoid his hunter's lone eye. That escape can thrive in the interstices between latent hope and eruptive despair.

But they have've had hours of sleepless solitude, and only this morsel of synthetic intimacy to share between them. To abandon Sumeragi Subaru now, on the inconsequential assumption that he might run as far and fast as his arachnid legs can carry him, would be woefully premature.

At first, he thinks to offer Subaru nothing, to bruise his pride. Then everything, to bruise his heart. He settles on the cigarette first — wet, reeking of additive plaster and the nutty aftertaste of pyrazines — then, careful not to tear textile in the exercise of peeling, the dark dregs of his long coat that he drapes like a first snow over the young man's shoulders. On a king, his mantle; on Sumeragi Subaru, maws feverishly consuming their quarry alive.

A ward, as it were, coming from chilled waters after what Seishirou suspects were several instances of negligent submersion. )

This colour doesn't suit you. ( Black, all black, too stern, too prideful. Not with Sumeragi Subaru's delicate bones, not with his winter colouring. ) Don't wear it again.

( Click, clack. They're walking, an assassin and his dog. Come along now. )

[sacral]

[ Sumeragi Subaru's awareness dilates. Unsuited. As maws are, despite the insistence upon him, the heavy texturing of manicured teeth. Their familiar warmth and scent, the presence of an unconsummated tenderness, and then — they're walking. Heels over ocean, over glass. ]

If you take it back from me, [ Seduction at its most austere: denial. ] then I won't get the chance.

[ He doesn't so much follow as walk wary and askew from his assassin, padded paw to expensive sole, distracted by the habit deposited as a token in his palm. The soaked cigarette sticks; he's careful to not bend it. Unlike Seishirou, Subaru is quicker to engage the limits of a new magic. It thrums its intrusion, copper-blue in his veins. In his palm, he scrawls and traces, puzzles the intersection of lines he knows and a text he doesn't. The innate predilection to nurture gives him several false starts, his aim unclear in brief sparks of light and heat. The darkness that saturates his fingertips is conservative, a calligrapher's ink lightened by repeat rinsing.

Invasion, armistice. Acceptance. His life is nothing if not a sum of similar instances, the same lines arranged to different fortunes.

His palm, held aloft like a bare branch from the ward of the jacket, glows. ]

This is a dream.

[hallowedly]

( Petrichor, a crackling prickling, electric. The residual sensation of magic enacted in proximity, on flesh that yearns instinctively to serve as conduit. He is — aware of Sumeragi Subaru at all times, the tannin of his life's wine sip. Aware, now, of the exercise of this fresh, repulsive, parasitic power that briefly inhabits Subaru's body, summoned to the vanguard: sensitivity, heat, tarnish. He cannot say if the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan is ruling the magic, or if he is himself ruled.

Earlier, when Seishirou attempted to draw on the well of his new parlour tricks, the dissonance rattled. Before, his illusions were instinctively responsive, a concession of the known world rebuilding fresh around his bones. Now, he must instruct, think, ration his resources, beware the disruptive volatility of the flows around water. Like sustained flame on a wetted match.

Of course Subaru prevails better, where Seishirou staggered. The bones of his immense ability, however begrudgingly conceded, would carry a powerhouse, if only Sumeragi Subaru visited pale notions of discipline. Never has a practitioner yearned more for a master. But then, Seishirou is not the man to cultivate his enemies.

He has stared too long, stalled his step; catches up again. Magic distracts, and here it breathes long gasps around them. )

A dream. ( He echoes the possibility, admits it. Is this cooperation? Very well. ) Not an illusion. ( In this, trust a master's opinion. ) But our dream seer has the civility to announce himself. And yours...

( Excuse the silvery smile. But they all know her circumstances. )

[sacral]

[ His power has never been denied. In truth, it runs in him all the same, this for that. He is Sumeragi, still, now, always, and yet his relationship with his blood has always been working and innate but never welcomed with open, familial arms. It is a tool, made richer when braided with divination, ritual, and ancestral wisdom. Whether it's his blood or the phantom presence of another whispering, "Use it" makes no difference. He does not know Her, but he doesn't need to. His identity as onmyouji is so latent in him that he understands the way this invasion is working, how She permeates the delicate strata of his soul.

Always freely surrendered, insomuch as his thalassic nature allows. Magic always cupped him in its palm, trusting in his pedigree to not violently overflow. It promised him cosmic cultivation. But he, too much like saltwater in its grasp, always looks to use his gravitas to slip quietly, naturally through its fingers instead. Vast, unexplored power, never to be held.

It's the aged, transluscent crepe of bird-boned scaffolding, not personal scripture.

In his hands, the chimerical sigil he's settled upon ignites. What follows is not flame or char, but the dry waft of warm tobacco. ]

This isn't the Princess's dream. We're not permitted on the other side of that mirror.

[ Unlike Kamui. The Kamui — either Kamui.

Finally in similar step, Subaru holds the mended cigarette out: currency. ]

We have the ability to change things.

[hallowedly]

( Hate is a harrowing thing, marrow-suckling. He watches Sumeragi Subaru perform a misdirected parlour trick, and it's the way of the new world that grips him, the cruel irony of expectations that he will

Could it be that Subaru has retained unviolated what purity of magic has gone ripped from Seishirou's hands...? No. The caricature of the exercise is an echo of the Sumeragi clan's seismic prowess. The drain on his body, the serpentine flashes below skin suggest... strain of circuitry a practitioner of Sumeragi Subaru's tenure has long extirpated.

He takes the cigarette in his hand, presses it against his lips, perks his brows expectantly. And the light? )

There's a price.

( And every whisper, every permutation of push and pull, every rivulet of rally that tempts him to use that which lies in hand has brought him to this moment. To this inevitable surrender.

Home, wherever that is, and living, the wet knot of Seishirou's strength unspools to flood him in high deluge, to eat of him as he eats of it, ouroboros. Here, he calls on a tight pool of energy, and it sizzles unsustained, itches in the way of exposure to an allergen.

Illusions are painting, no numbers: the stain of fire he calls at the end of his cigarette is a pale artifice he builds in strokes, layer of colour by layer of sound, the crackling, the precision of flickers, the scent of sooty aerosol. Grand masterpieces of illusion are breathtaking but often less detailed; this is a work of miniature art, a token of skill.

Then, all at once, the false flame dies, cigarette untouched in its wake.

It's sudden, the cascade gushing up his throat, lairing in his mouth: wet metal, red and blossoming like bruised cherry's skin. He removes the cigarette. Then he thinks, urban delinquent, to spit the blood to the side; abstains through force of civilized habit, a calamity with a pedigree.

On the back of his hand, the smear of blood comes a pale sheen, sprawling. He shows it off to Subaru with a studied fluorish, the happenstance equivalent of mirrored seals. )

There is always a price. ( And he suspects — this strange little world charges interest. )

[sacral]

[ Seishirou's blood arrests him. His hesitance is an imprint of tenderness his bloodline has allowed to slip, somewhere, through the cracks. A lesion in its efficacy, a sieve through which his magic sifts through. Pure. Ruined by dilution too gentle. He would have loved to keep the rupturing of fear off of his face but he finds that he's too late and instead must contend with its arrival. Blood, a sign of life. Blood, a sign of death. For the moment, the relief of a dream wanes against the waxing of a memory. There was another bridge, not long ago. Gutted, innards sprawling, spewing smoke and bones. Its jaws poised over a cataclysm so quiet only he heard it.

Beneath the overlong drape of his jacket lapels, his fingers clench into the material, a tethering not ruled by the laws of this dream like their magic is. The reminder runs riot in him, the translucence of the killing memory warm and fresh. His veins crawl, a skin-veiled language too blotted out by his blatancy for him to hear.

That's right, he has his jacket —

He rummages the pockets, nudges past the still-wet pack of cigarettes, dredges his (his) lighter.

When he approaches, it's with a thumb flick of ordinary human invention that he brings the light with him. It's a painfully inert circumstance to succumb to, holding it aloft in the desolation of every motion and magic that's brought him here. Subaru is, despite the odds, alarmingly whole. ]

Are you going to learn it?

[ The flame is steady. A challenge lacking the fang of his former assumptions, or... ]

Or do we wake up?

[ There, hope grafted to the fabric of this dream, a will for it to take. ]

[hallowedly]

( We.

Do we wake up, do we walk onward, do we survive, do we thrive, are we in —

— sickness and in health —

And one plus one equals one, because sayeth the clan, the Sakurazukamori dies at the hand that most lovingly feeds him. And he watches Sumeragi Subaru's, startled and anaemic around the opal teardrop of the lighter's flame, heartbeat triphammering in his wrist's veins, and nails blunt from drumming hard on floors and harder on ojuzu and scratching and scraping blood and death off ice-seared skin during ablutions.

Seishirou died by these hands.

For a moment, the sermon of the water's stillness is his song, and he is a man made buried monster, he is beneath debris and gravel, he is collapsed on a bridge gazing skyward and blind, and there are birds, always birds high calling. And he sees trailing wisps of the bright sun, and he sees an eye green, and he sees nothing, disdaining him.

Nothing but dreams and quagmire and a sea of bleached, long hums. Nothing at all.

...and do they wake up? )

Subaru-kun... ( His mouth feels dry with bitter shame, with the astringency of secrets. A better man, a braver man —

But he is cold, so cold, and he's alive, and his numb hands slither first to catch around Subaru's on the lighter, then mount to his forearms, his shoulders, and he sees the sixteen-year-old boy who was, and the twenty-five-year-old wraith who became, and he pushes both off the glass bridge, both into gasping water.

And, turning on his heel, he doesn't wake up to death, looming. He doesn't look back. )

[sacral]

[ A single breath and then he is given to the sea to swallow. Not an undeserved fate for his new flavor of recklessness.

Once more, Sumeragi Subaru sinks. There have been worse baths in his lifetime, waters colder and more brittle and more demanding of sacrificial skin. Purification. Pallidity roared raw. Ritual. Is this also ritual? Something avowed? On a second drowning, the water is kinder. It's neither the sinking of a faith mirror-cracked nor the buoyant floating of a conscience scrubbed clean of ghosts' blame. There is a ghost about him now, the long heavy tendrils of a tailored coat's arms wrapped around him as if they'd deliver him straight to the bottom. He blinks upwards, through the salt. There is no light to see Sakurazuka Seishirou by.

There was a time where Subaru feared the very idea of Seishirou's anger so much that it nearly capsized every nerve in his body. A time where the mere idea of his leaving made Subaru cry for days until he was left empty and hot, a nascent celestial canvas on which anything could catch and bloom.

Disease. Cherry blossoms. Even love.

In the gentle sway of Sleep's ocean, Subaru knows the man he became was better off never loving the man who never was.

Was he angry? He sketches the remains around him. ...No, maybe not.

Time cycles. Once, twice. Subaru doesn't die, but reawakens with a new emotion bloodless on his tongue each time. Each a notch on withered branch, a stone thrown down into a catacomb in hopes that a familiar echo might return.

None seem right, each attempt leaving dissatisfaction to gather in starlit pools, the primordial well-tap of his own neglect. And it's this denial that drags him from the tides at last, back up onto the bridge, the sodden, heavy, heavy coat folded dutifully into the wet crook of his arm. The lighter returns to its pocket, and Subaru walks the distance of the bridge alone. This new memory has a silence to it that needles at him more than scorn, the mere notion of scorn, ever had.

It's two again. Two whose emotions escape him. We.

By the time he makes it ashore, the hour stretches dark over the ribcage steeples of the palace. And Subaru, still flagrant in his sopping wetness, declines the dream's bid at proper attire for a banquet and rocks the hall's door open on its hinges. His eyes cut across the table, whole and gemstone raw.

Many have made it, more than it would seem as they were sparsely collected from the water.

But it's really just one he's after. To honor a favor, a poor color choice — the waterlogged coat rattles a thud against the table placement adjacent to Sakurazuka Seishirou. ]

I'm returning it.

[hallowedly]

( He's returning it, this ghost of a man come to walk Seishirou's grave, this wraith living out eternal torment like vivisection. And he's alive, still, impossibly. Eyes wet like opheodrys scales and the bite of him lightning-quick and whipping, and he's dropped off the coat as he might meat off his bone. And he intends to coax the tatters of his reputation to himself in its stead, then he'll slither.

Seishirou's table is a broken galaxy of half gnawed meal morsels orbiting a chipped, fire-golden decanter and blood-washed debris of teeth and porcelain sharpnel spat. He does not ask for the health of his fellow merrymakers; he has paid, between gulps of heavily watered brandy and heat that coils around his spine and sings happiness in the gaunt stretch of his bile-churned belly. He looks at a woman's feline mask, then the suffocation of thin filigree behind her on gilted panneling, then the world aburst with light and laughter. Looks at a ceiling painted in viscera of oil and the wisped, smoke haze of candles, burning. Blinks.

Gravity pulls: he catches Sumeragi Subaru's wrist, blitzing, on habit. )

Worse for the wear. ( This, catching the corpse of his coat, settling it two chais away where it nearly crushes a diminutive, elderly man, who shifts the seas of his wrinkles in a scowl, but scuttles. And he pushes Subaru to the emptied corner seat, and he mouths, Sit —

And some dregs from the bottomless well of his poisoned charisma make it charming. The woman, his neighbour, laughs first: it's the old of her knowing, predatory gaze, the blue of Subaru's persuasion, the borrowed of Seishirou's overcoat and the new of their bloodless reunion. How fetching. His mouth lines the mountain chain of Subaru's knuckles with faint, ghostly kisses; he doesn't let go.

Air fine like a moth's wing, the chandelier's light cataracted. And, tinny, the woman's still laughing. )

Hmmm? Oh, I agree. He doesn't eat enough. ( But he's so thin already. ) It's the fashion, I think. Today's youth... ( Tsk, tsk. He forces Subaru's hand to him, kisses it again. ) But I keep saying, I wouldn't want him any different. I'd die for him.

[sacral]

[ Physical command has never favored him so much as his magical command. He was commanded into the sea. Now into a seat. Sit as a breath becomes sit as an ordinance, a precept written in the taut ligaments of his wrist bone. Anxieties bloom in response to such a shameless display that their enmity and decorum never would have allowed onlookers before the beginning of the end. Too easily, he thinks to himself, knuckles a furious stardust white. Too easily this man died for him and too easily does he exhume the hallowed ground that one might spiritually, senselessly, call sleep. Too easily does he wield the blunt instrument of his demise as a flattering ice breaker after attempting to drown him with it.

And too easily does Subaru dare to wonder if he wouldn't find more contentment in this reality as opposed to the one he left behind. If he could think of this as being awake —

He ruminates, guilt golden as a wolf's gaze, pulling bitter pith from the fruit as sustenance. He so politely allows Seishirou control of his hand, momentarily thinking better of his own bones joining those on the place settings. It doesn't stop the curl of his fingers, the intimate act of nails pressing warning crescents down on his captor's skin.

Meeting over a dinner table is a complication that the fated battlefield never afforded him; favoritism and a busy schedule ill-equip him the rest of the way. ]

You make it sound like an ill omen. [ He strains backwards, filaments flickering. ] ...your hands are overwarm.

[ Warmer than the kisses, the tidal numb of their touch on the bridge. Subaru is used to part of this, the sawing and serrated edge of Seishirou's whimsy, his affections. All he needs is to leave the impression of incisors perforating a new fault line on which to channel his energies and Subaru's skin complies. Sacred scar tissues draw hot across the back of his hand, tinted into each sharp point of the Sakurazukamori's seal. Hands are instruments of transmutation, their weapons of choice.

And so they exist, even here. Hypocritically, his fingers relax. ]

[hallowedly]

( And sometimes he thinks of this young man and his kittenish hiss, and his eyes like molten brass, and his yearning. Thinks of the dark drift of his hair and his worn-in, eroded prettiness that might have shimmered and shined and caught fresh light, like dull silver coins sunken in marsh water. He thinks, Sumeragi Subaru's innocent beauty should have charmed snakes and coaxed down stars and filled the gaunt belly of Gashadokuro.

Instead, he's this: a wasted morsel between the choosy teeth of Sleep, relentless, and the feast's merrymakers, blind in their greed, and Sakurazuka Seishirou, fleeting in his interest. His hard knuckles strain white in a hard clasp of Subaru's hand, and he whispers sweet nothings under the susurration of chandelier light, blinking dark. )

Bear them.

( For a heartbeat (two), light dwindles like a heart attack, then pulses alive. Flickers, flutters and — goes off, to an eruption of saccharine laughter, before fresh-cut candles float in quick succession. To think, their host might be alarmed of what her little creatures could do unseen.

He enjoys it, this spell of settling, bellicose darkness, like coffee dregs at the bottom of a cracked cup. Leans in, between the quick infussion of murmurs, to spy his seals in glowing glory on Subaru's skin, only to find them... lacking. Wan and sweet and subtle, for all they hold shape. Changed, in ways he had arrogantly presumed his artificially prolonged existence would mitigate.

And he squeezes Sumeragi Subaru's hand all the harder for it.

There is no doctor in this house, yet here deteriorates the health of an organic bond that has decided to triumph over death — but change, for all of it. This footprint of Seishirou's life, imperceptible faded. And wistfully, looking down still, thumbing the sketch of the seal of a caught hand — )

...whose game is this, really? ( As if Subaru himself ordained it. As if it were his choice. Light begins to spear back from small corners, candles accruing. For once, his smile feels unpractised. )

Forgive me, I mistook you. I'd thought you never learned to play.

[sacral]

[ Anything could live in this darkness. It seethes. It sighs. An invocation — not of luck, but synchronicity. By the dull pulsing of new candlelight, shadow-bruised, sluggish, and sweet, Subaru could likewise mistake the smile. There's a reason why the soul is perilous in sleep. It remembers too much of what the heart chambers away; it remembers the other ways in which Subaru wished to bear his hands. Overhead, the flowering vines of the palace's ribcage steeple seem to weigh heavy, peering downwards. ]

There were enough years in between. [ He counted. ] But it's not the same. You know that.

[ Whatever conduit Seishirou floods is one-way. All divinations failed him in tracing them back to the source for all the years that it mattered, that he dared to look. He doesn't parse the fragile writhe of the Sakurazukamori's magic searching for its rightful purchase in him. They are — a reminder, always, not a dialogue.

A reminder that it was easier to upend the ground they stood on in a fit of moons and blood paint and architecture in search of what he was looking for. Violence and enmity learned with all the exquisite diligence of his breed, now held in the backs of his teeth. He fought but was not loyal to humanity, or to the Seals, the Dragons and their Heaven. He was loyal to these marks. He was loyal to Sakurazuka Seishirou, loyal...

In sickness and in —

sickness. ]

They remained.

[ After. Frustrations splintered between unnatural skin heat and waterlogged perturb, he senses the difference in Seishirou's reaction. Something changed. ]

[hallowedly]

( They... remained. How charitably indiscriminate. Of course, the touch of a devoted lover or a sophisticated whore are the same to a blind man running the fevers of his yearning. That Sumeragi Subaru can't differentiate the subtle trickling of change is... unpardonable in ways the Kirimono mask of Seishirou's benevolence fleetingly cracks in a cleaved grimace to betray.

He stands above disappointment or heartbreak. Above matters of base, every-day jealousy. But this is — prophecy, birthright, Subaru's blood, Seishirou's will. This should have been, and his fingers wrench their way in between Subaru's to force the clasp, personal. But Sumeragi Subaru has already crowned the nostalgic reassurance of flesh-born truths above the station of intelligent allegiance. )

I suppose they were never mine.

( They belonged, indelibly, to the Sakurazukamori. To think he has adopted in his successor. Will wonders of bastardized clan rite affairs ever cease. His little prey-wife should only be so flattered to walk forest grounds of cartilage and bone and leave the funerary copse a man raised to the vanguard of two clans of distinction. Will he purify, still? Seek out Ama-no-Habakiri and slay his demons, or join them in the red ranks? )

You should eat. ( In the dark dissolving. ) Baku won't heed you here. The dream dances on. We're on borrowed on time, at the largesse of an emperor that hasn't ordained you. ( And how personally spiteful that must be for the Sumeragi, the empire's anointed. ) Whatever strength you can gather, you will need.

[sacral]

[ Hinoki splinters; pigment runs. Craftsmanship shears beneath Seishirou's unidle grip.

An itch toils away at the dissolution of his nerves beneath the second invocation: fate. Digs, beneath the crushing weave of fingertip to delicate metacarpals, the constitution of which bends like a bird wing under the leering imposition of a heel. Around them, he feels the faint inhalation of some other prowling love, sees it in the new candles' flutter. The scars murmur but he can't make out their sacred syllables, blood blooming with new anointment, new rot. This place burgeons with an upset he would never dream of.

He rejects it, in fact.

Never his and yet it was what remained, truth sundered from fact, holy annihilation given shape on the backs of his hands. His expression grows translucent as he considers the wet bulwark of Seishirou's coat still thrown to his side. ]

You've already determined the price of the feast, haven't you? [ These masked dreamers conjured up from Her remembrance, dressed as heartbreak, dressed as avarice, sent as welcoming. ] This is an empress who won't provide strength for nothing in return.

[hallowedly]

( Price, gain, beads of blood and tears of sweat and heartache, and Sumeragi Subaru a creature so stricken that hawks have pillaged his limbs. He cannot bear risk, does not see opportunity. There is bravery in him, to the shape of hands Seishirou holds near and dear and tight; and he cannot bleed more.

So be it. That Seishirou relinquishes one hand writes the testament of his stubborn pride, biding the fat swell of the gilded decanter close to drizzle down the honeyed emulsion of synthetic wickedness in his cup. In Subaru's, after. And he does not wait: only tips his glass in false salute and tastes the brandy's swelter and raises his brows. And lo, This one can be born. You coward. )

There is always a price.

( He has said so before, pays it now. A Vesuvian eruption of kaleidoscopic, ruptured sound: he lacks the singular strength of emotion, a burst of happiness, but a carousel of splinters bound, crushed shrapnel, into the pulp of feeling.

It hits like gunshot: his mother's laughter at a first spell, the pride; the tang of raspberry sorbet during tepid late summer; a storm of blooded petals, then nothing, and winter's gone and the child rushes to the tree's roots, and he weeps for corpses long seen to earth; his shikigami, in flight; the succor of Hokuto's heel plasters after a night's chase, stiff box-leathered shoes breaking in; Tokyo in flourish; Tokyo in rags and ruin.

Every moment, bare, flays and eats of his liver and hangs his innards loose and cuts his heart open; and there: there is the beat. He does not flinch, the twirl of the brandy in his cup swishing, lethargic. They must feed, they must drink, they must gain strength for bodies absent the woes of biology but still imprisoned by sustenance. Cutting the fat off one's dignity to preserve the bone is... practical. )

Drink, to her memory.

[sacral]

[ A taunting brow does less than the weight of memory thrown against him. ...And then it's also less contusion than he'd anticipated. Kinder. The benign blood-letting of happiness moves in syrupy waves, the lukewarm melt of it metastasizing onto brief moments of familiarity. It visits taste on him, and touch, somewhat blurred by the tired drum of a pulse in his ears. Tokyo's fiery neons scent his memory, its sugars and metallic exhaust volatile, alive. There is still a pulse — whose, he doesn't dare to say.

Subaru is frowning first, then blinking the golden motes away, then poising the surrendered fingertips of his free hand over the rim of his glass in stunned obedience. He picks it up, less inclined to release the brandy's aromatics even in the pursuit of more inertia. He lacks the glamour for it. ]

This kind of strength is best remembered in dreams. It's more persistent.

[ It must be irony and not hunger that churns his insides. It must be hunger long staved for any evidence of these memories, the denial of hope he'd long enshrined in his hunt for absolution. Starvation was more practical save for the gaunt vices he'd adopted into his rotation, a cross-sectioning of preparedness that betrayed him in the end. ]

So, in choosing this...

[ Glass in flight, from tabletop to the tilt of his lips. Subaru finally drinks, the long draw of its flame unfamiliar. It meanders down his body, the first cut of sun through a miasmic winter fog. Like the cold birthday winters of Kyoto, the tender baby skin of his unadorned fingers held in his grandmother's as they carefully descend the steps of his home; a dog's warm, coarse scruff where he's buried his nose into the sweet dust of its fur; Hokuto's brave color-matching fabrics to his skin; her voice, always, in scolding, in elation, in the devoted brushstrokes of her understanding; the clattering of his trot to keep up with much longer strides towards the vet clinic, dinner's ingredients in hand. A hospital exterior, thrown in the same sunlight he tastes. Hands in his, hands drawing across his face; arms in embrace, the countless thank yous of those delivered by him. Happiness is an unknowable amalgamation until his lips brush over the marks without a master. It sharpens to a point.

His drink alleviates the tension of Her eye, her offense. In Seishirou's grip, his still entrenched hand is pale with sweat, his votive scar in soft reverb.

Subaru looks sick, an animal's first brush with nourishment after long drought. ]

...what have you come to understand about the rest of it?

[ Surely it cannot be worse. ]

[hallowedly]

( Something borrowed, something true, something lost and someone blue. The stormy sovereignty of flinching memories in a golden (tea)cup. He feels ripples and resonance, the screams of illusions, ruptured. Paltry work, unprofessional.

Beneath his hand, the deceptive lushness of Sumeragi Subaru's curse-coarsened skin, he sees the spread of his twin star's slender fingers, the bluntness of Subaru's nails dulled with slate of incense ash. How they are longer than a day of fast and the night sky, how they could trap death or choke it, how they only so recently fit, compelled by her in Seishirou's chest, how they tore through him like rupturing silk, how he —

— fell then, flinches now, lets go. Is this it, then, protracted? The malign sickness of salted fear, lairing up under Seishirou's tongue? The mouth of anticipation looms over him. He shuts his eyes and breathes and lives and wrenches his hand away. And the wet of his heaving is the start of cold sweat, is a night terror turned fever.

He can't linger on this. He can't afford to fear his death or its maker. )

That you don't have the stomach for much of it. ( That Seishirou himself can't readily contain a man of Sumeragi Subaru's force, unleashed upon this world, under the influence. ) How much have you been giving away?

( Of himself, of his — their — nature. Sumeragi Subaru is but one morsel between many carnivorous mouths, yet, above all, he cannibalizes himself. Erodes his shine, shares his tricks, lessens his glory. Subaru is a whole sieve into parts, he is autumn to his own branches.

And he risks both of their secrets. )

[sacral]

[ No, he doesn't have the stomach for it.

Subaru thinks he mistakes the nature of his sudden release from Seishirou's grip, its reversed magnetism corrupting into a newborn star's repellence. It's dust and it's death, it's carbon, gold, oxygen. It breathes, he breathes, the inhalation before a sundering. Subaru missed it the first time, catches it now. His inky fingertips flex aside slightly, intending to chase understanding right into the gravity well of this feeling's creation, but he hesitates. His expression downturns, lip corners and lashes slivering him into crescents. ]

Nothing. [ He empties the rest of the cup instead. It coils sunny and serpentine all the way down, flickered tongue-tasting his insides. ] It's just this.

[ It's just the illusion of memory spilled out around him, a tincture of bittersweet nostalgia smattered by the beckoning hand of their dreamer. But Subaru is familiar with illusion, and this is not the elegant totality of the Sakurazukamori's full capability. Subaru has enshrined its skill in his faulted heart — this sort of external kintsugi no longer works on him. He watches his own memories prance past in auric swirls of preserved joy; there are precious few Seishirou doesn't occupy.

Only one oddity lingers at his peripherals: flowers that didn't belong to him, the accusation of blooms swelling out of season. Cherry blossoms. Camellia. ]

And you already had it, so there's no point in giving it to you.

[hallowedly]

Give it anyway.

( Alms in a Buddhist priest's bowl, white rice for ofuda strips, a smile for a pretty girl's night-sung virtue. For everything, its price.

Not this: not Seishirou's hand, recoiling serpentine. Not his mouth, trapped in the caricatural convulsions of habit, yearning for an absent cigarette muscle memory summons as a distraction. His fingers drum the table's edge in pulses of restlessness electric, catch of his shadow dancing like wraiths. And he puts it, the seedling of feeling, in a box, embalms the derelict debris of his fear and entombs it, and he decides, in the great, growing tumult of white noise drowned, that Sumeragi Subaru should grieve it.

Around them, the world is dim light and xanthous fevers of oversaturation, the excesses of a dream that seeks to replicate life without calibration. To his left, a woman, fingers wet with plum juices, laughs til her jugular must bruise and her chest ache; to his right, a man never sips, but gulps down his brandy with parched enthusiasm. Nothing is commensurate with the mundanity of the day-to-day experience. Everything is too much.

And in that spirit, shrill shrieks of metal plunging to the floor, he discards both his and dear Subaru's cups off the table in the clean sweep of one hand. Let her watch, then. Let her see. )

My, my. To think the thirteenth head of the Sumeragi clan is such a cheap date. Under the circumstances, I don't even have to pay for my kouhai's dinner. ( No, Seishirou's ledger's hardly the one flooded red enough to rust the knives of their conversation. ) You must be breathing easier, knowing I won't kill you here.

( Can't. Shouldn't. Ability, guideline, possibility, probability, instinct, wish. Steps to the cusp of a peak, the start of an abyssal plunge. Never look down; leap. A cup screeches, rolling by his foot. )

Are you? Don't waste the opportunity. Breathe in.

[sacral]

[ Her eye turns on them at this mannerless affront but Subaru doesn't feel it. Blossomed sight, slighted, and the infinite curl of a rokurokubi's neck overhead. The long loom of shadowed wings eclipses the table instead, whistling ritual. There is no universe, awake or asleep, in which Sumeragi Subaru can see past Seishirou's ensconcing. He's never dreamed of tearing this embrace down, to bone, piecemeal in violence — only succumbing. And the nearby memory of it refuses to visit him in its horrifying reversal. Somehow, this final acknowledgement of what he'd done doesn't make him flinch. He knows how; the why of the invocation is less distinct.

His hands are still on the table, gripping nothing. Loyal grief comes when called. It silts the bottom of his heart, foundational and reflective. Won't. Can't. Shouldn't, but could. Seishirou could do it, where Subaru can't. The fear is his now, a dead thing slipped onto his tongue as the brandy's chaser. ]

Our appetites were always mismatched. [ He's standing over a grave with a ghost believing he is not a ghost. That is his only opportunity. ] I am. Breathing. I have been, this whole time.

[ The head wanders while the body sleeps. The soul learns somnambulism. The cup rolls, its metallic wail softened by the edge of his shoe where it comes to rest.

Slight, but touch enough for him to inhale, this resurrection feeling out of order. ]

[hallowedly]

I'm relieved.

( That goaded, guttural simmering of Subaru's exhalations against the thunderclap of the hall's commotion — a drip of life in a sea of death, dream and damnation. The discordance warms the cockles of Seishirou's heart. And he watches, gaze sharp and gilded, and the dance of nearby masks and shadows irreverent in the diffusion of its mutilated steps.

Subaru breathes. The halls breathe with him. Seishirou feels — feverish, alert, cold. Sickly and sickened. Cruelty sours his tongue. )

In fact... I'm afraid present circumstances make it impossible for me to rise to the occasion of your clan's typical fee. But I'm hoping you'll make an exception, for old times' sake.

( What is the line he will not cross? Is it red with his blood, or Subaru's, or Hokuto's own? Why can't he glimpse it now? Why must he keep talking — )

If what we both suspect is true — ( And he is dead, so very dead, corpse cold and bones sun-blanched and rattling, and his carcass alight with the song of prey birds, their bloodied beaks scratching. ) — then I can think of no one better suited to exorcise my spirit.

( The well of his magic is dry like a womb stopped with silt, like an ink stick turned brittle — but waters wait and build and brim, and no soil seeds disaster like the spirit of an onmyouji unpacified. There are rules for this, sacred wards to prevent the necromantic misuse of powerful bodies as instruments in another Kamui's wars, words of whispered caution and ofuda stretched out, clammy and wet, on dead limbs like a second skin.

The likes of a Sakurazukamori wants burial, wants exorcism, wants containment. He must be rinsed from this world, like a miasma. Surely, that is writ in the sacral Sumeragi texts, surely it is known. Surely, Sumeragi Subaru has an obligation.

Is it rite or revenge to ask, here, now, of Subaru?

(Right, his right, his right.)

Seishirou's hands join the table, fingers spidering out, spilling. He grips — first the wooden expanse, then the deformity of his self-control. His back, is a rigid line, a shield, uncrumbling as he bows deep in ritual reverence, forehead to table. )

Thirteenth head, I humbly ask you to please accept this case.