Deflowering
Shien has always been alone. He has never opened his robe for a
woman or lifted his robe for a man. But now he has undone his girdle, removed
his underrobe, and bent himself over Homura's carved wooden bedstead. He waits for
Homura, the toushin who performs the filthy and necessary work of Heaven, to do
this filthy and necessary thing to him. His heart jars unnervingly in a way it
never has before. His mind holds feelings it has never known before. The
feelings are hard-edged and faceted like jewels, bright against the unobtrusive
beige determination that has brought him to this deed. He caresses them with
quiet satisfaction. Fear and shame. Shame and fear. He burns slowly with them
both. Shame in his face, fear in his gut. Shame at his nakedness, at the
position he is in, baring all that decency requires be kept covered. Shame at
becoming another man's urinal, prepared to take the leavings of that man's
body. Fear of the thing that will be done to him, fear at what he is doing,
fear most of all perhaps of Homura himself- the unknowableness of what is
inside the itan's mind.
Homura unnoticed for five hundred
years. Homura whom he did not wish to notice. The battle god, the toushin
taishi. The new one. Homura unnoticeable for nearly that long. Heaven's
servant, Heaven's puppet, an obedient killing machine. A nonentity. Until the
day Shien began to notice Homura, because Homura had changed, or because Shien
himself had, no saying which. Saw the spirit inside the quiet figure that stood
forever by itself in the fields of Heaven, saw the odd light in his odd eyes
when they slid over to meet his briefly, and began to sense that something new
was afoot. In Homura or in himself, no saying which.
Because he'd started to notice Zenon before that, the outsider,
the one who'd gone down to earth and taken a human woman to wife. Suddenly saw
him as more than an ill-mannered eccentric, deliberately uncouth. Something
different. A man who has gone away, left heaven, gone elsewhere and done things
unimaginable, and who must therefore have a whole part of his soul that doesn't
match the endless unchangingness of the world Shien has lived in since forever.
Zenon, Homura. Something different. Inhabitants of a world Shien can enter
himself perhaps, if only, if he can find the door into difference.
For five hundred years, the same
thing. Nameless, inside him, the feeling he carries, grey as his robe, grey as
his hair. Nataku-sama. The regret of that name, the endless regret...
for what? That's the thing Shien doesn't know. There are no words, there were
never any words to fit the thing that he felt for Nataku. Service, loyalty,
devotion yes, all those. Admiration for Nataku's gallantry and his bravery and
his own dry-eyed loyalty to what he knew, child though he was, to be not worthy
of his loyalty. Love, maybe even, the love a man feels for a great commander
and hero. But the thing that hurt Shien most when Nataku was alive, the thing
that hurts him still, the thing he wanted then and will never have now, for
that he has no words. Only once has someone ever come close to saying what it
was. Escorting his commander to the prisons, standing in the shadows at his
back, and hearing from the cell that jaunty voice, reflective now and dark as a
bruise- And the thing that hurts the most is that he has no-one to even say
'it hurts' to. But that voice is gone now, and no-one since has been able
to put a name to Shien's pain.
Meetings. The beginnings of an
acquaintance- you couldn't call it friendship- with Zenon. Moving slowly into
the other world. Seeing from his closed eyes, while he talked to Zenon, the
unchancy figure of the toushin taishi in the distance. Always with his back
turned on them, always with his gaze fixed on something else. Purple coat
blowing in the wind. Brown hair lifting from his neck. Shien made an occasion
to put himself in Homura's path. Exchanged some small remark with him. Homura's
odd-coloured eyes sized him up, looked below his surface for what might be seen.
What did he see? A disaffected Heaven-dweller seeking a change, any change? A
will to service lost without someone to serve? No-one else has looked past
Shien's face, past the closed eyes that deny the world entrance to his mind,
and into the place in his heart where Shien stands, obscurely wounded, feeling
himself somehow... insufficient. No-one else could see so far. Homura's itan
eyes, yellow and purple, did. That was when it began, the fear and the shame.
Little trickles like sand sifting out, before the whole building collapses.
Fear that Homura could see him, shame at what Homura saw. And the quiet
happiness that change was still possible for him.
"What do you want?" Homura
asked, smiling as if he knew already.
"Use me," Shien said.
So here they are.
Homura comes behind him, heat from
his body against Shien's legs even though their bodies do not yet touch.
Homura's hands are hot, dry and hot. Homura presses up against his hips, and
something hard and hot drives itself into the only opening in Shien's body, the
only possible breach in his walls. Hard as iron, hot as iron, burning with a
pain like fire, and he is run through, spitted in his shameful parts by
Homura's shameful part. In his darkness Shien breathes in and out, shallowly,
around the little space that Homura's sex allows him. He waits for that huge
hurtingness to move back. He breathes and waits for the pain, more pain, but
the pain doesn't come. Homura's hand comes instead, reaching under him, around
him, large and hot. Shien's breath catches in his throat; his hands tighten on
the coverlet. Large, hot, stroking him into heat, touching the part that aches
with pleasure, aches with need- Touch me there, just there, touch me again
touch me touch me-- Shien is making little sounds in his nose, in his
throat, that he can't stop. So hot so good Homura's strong hand all about him,
working him hard making him hard, heat running through him like the huge flames
of a bonfire, all along his sex, into his bowels, up through his chest. The
bindings across Shien's heart turn to ash in a moment. Homura's hand is on his
heart and his heart is melting inside him. Shien is undone. His head lifts and
his face twists, and what comes from his mouth are cries aaanhh aanhhh
annNNHHH of pain and pleasure fused together. Inside him the workings
begin, out of control and stronger than ever before, heat rushing out from the
centre of him molten as lava and up through his groin and out as he screams
like a man burning alive.
And drops back onto the bed, drops
back into himself, in the darkness of his head and the darkness of his world.
Hides his face in the coverlet as the scalding water runs from his eyes. Shien
has never wept. Shien has never known any reason to weep. But now the tears run
out of him like blood, and he lets them run, burning alive with what he now
knows. Homura begins to move within him. In his darkness Shien feels the pain
of it, red and aching, the counterpoint to the red and aching pain inside him.
It goes on and on, and the water runs from his eyes, on and on, five hundred
years' worth and more.
Homura finishes, draws out of Shien
and back. There is nothing left to do. Shien stands up and lets his robe cover
him as before. Steels his spirit to do what he fears to do and must. He turns
around so that Homura can see his shame fully. Homura's woman, brought to
screaming pleasure and reduced to foolish tears at Homura's will. He stands
naked in spirit before Homura and all that clothes him is his Shien-ness, that
poor ragged garment of his self, pitiful and all he has.
Homura speaks, voice no different
from before. Contained, reflective, perilous. "If you forgive me for this,
come and join me. If you don't forgive me, go and be my enemy. The choice is
yours."
"I'm not so small of soul as to
blame the man who shows me my heart, just because I don't care for what I see
there," Shien says, and hopes it is true. "I will join you."
"Did I?"
"You did." He opens his
dead eyes and looks at Homura. The toushin taishi. The new one. "He was a
great warrior and a great heart," Shien says, "but he was only a
child. I would have cherished him with all that is in me. I would have kept his
enemies from him with my own body and let him be free, because I was a man and
he was only a child. That was what I wanted to do, though I didn't know it
until now. But his father would not allow it and he would not allow it, and
there was nothing to be done. He chose to be what he was, though he had no
choice in the matter. I chose to let him, because I had no choice in the
matter. I thought I had no choice, and who knows whether that is the truth or
not? Either I was a coward or I was a slave, and which it was I hope never to
find out."
"Do you blame yourself for that?"
Homura asks, eyebrow lifting. He tilts his head in inquiry, and his
odd-coloured eyes, his all-wrong eyes, look straight into Shien's. "When
they let me out they took wagers, I think, whether I'd find something to keep
me alive for even a year. I did, eventually, but it took me long enough. I *was*
a coward and I *was* a slave, for five hundred years, and what of it? I
am Homura now, and Heaven will pay me for the service it exacted from me."
And he smiles.
The words drop into Shien's head.
The pain begins to ease inside him and the shame to recede. He closes his eyes,
and he can see Nataku-sama in his head, Nataku whose name always meant I
could do nothing to Shien, as Shien now knows. Nataku is standing beside a
man, a grown man, the man he never lived to become, who will protect and avenge
him at last. Homura, whose name means I can do something now. And with
the promise of that, with that decision made, Shien becomes himself again, made
somehow whole at last.
"Us," Shien says. "Heaven will pay us."
"Anhh," Homura agrees. "Us."
MJJ
Dec '02