[fic] feel you most when i'm alone
Jan. 19th, 2021 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositefeel you most when i'm alone
fandom: prince of tennis
ship: yagyuu/niou (r63)
rating: m
word count: 2k
2882 indulging in a bit of bodyswapped murder and dismemberment And They Were Both Girls... inspired by beautiful perfect atmospheric roy nvgs400 art!! contains non-graphic(?) gore. i meant for this to be set in high school but i forgot my intentions partway through so it's kind of ambiguous but that is OK
--
She grows aware of Niou’s presence almost before Niou’s figure appears in the entrance to the alleyway, a sixth-sense prickle at the base of her spine. She’d call it a premonition, if she were more of the superstitious type. “You’re early, Yagyuu,” Yagyuu calls, in Niou’s lazy drawl. “I’m not done yet.”
Niou touches the bridge of her glasses. “I am always punctual, Niou-kun,” she replies.
Yagyuu grins. “Any earlier and you would’ve seen something that might offend a lady,” she says. The knife in her hand dangles loosely, its grip slippery against her fingers.
“You’ve certainly been the corruptive influence,” Niou says, walking closer. There’s not much light in the narrow alleyway, the dim vestiges of the glow from a streetlight at the other end of the passage catching on a few stray strands of her wig. “I came to see if you needed help with the cleanup.”
Tamagawa Yoshio’s corpse lies in a small dark pool of its own blood, oozing out from five stab wounds onto the tarp they’d prepared earlier. Yagyuu hadn’t planned to make things quite so messy but Niou had been right; once she started it had been too easy to keep going. She breathes in the damp, iron-scented air. She says, “Sure. Try not to faint.”
Two weeks ago, they’d been spitballing some potential variations on one of their newer play strategies in the empty classroom overlooking the courts they often requisitioned as a private discussion space when Yagyuu caught a glimpse of a pale head of hair going down to the clubroom through the window and was briefly blinded by rage.
Niou’d noticed the flicker to Yagyuu’s attention. “What’s up?”
“It’s nothing important,” Yagyuu said, tamping the irritation down. “Only that second-year alternate, Tamagawa Yoshio… I don’t approve of the way he carries himself. Presenting himself as a gentleman when he is anything but…”
Niou lifted an eyebrow. “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Niou-kun, but I don’t appreciate people making a mockery of my area of expertise,” Yagyuu said. Then she added, mildly, “I might kill him.”
Of course Niou had zeroed in immediately on the underlying note of Yagyuu’s intent. “You’re serious about this?”
She hadn’t been sure until Niou spoke it aloud, and then she was. “Yes. I rather think I am.”
Niou’s fingers drummed out an impatient rhythm against the desk. “You’ll be me when you do it, obviously,” Niou said. “Yagyuu Hiromi’s hands will stay clean.” She said it with her typical sneer; it was difficult to tell, even for Yagyuu, if the words were laced with any additional venom or irony. Offhand: “Akaya doesn’t like him either.”
“How should we do it?” It was the plural now, or maybe had always been, the convergence inevitable. “Poison would be the most unobtrusive method—”
“Boring,” Niou dismissed. “You hate the guy, don’t you? So stab him or something. If you’re gonna murder someone, you might as well get all the mileage you can out of it.”
“Stabbing is very… personal,” Yagyuu says. “Is that something you would do? I would hate to break character.”
“Maybe,” Niou said, shrugging. “I might do anything. Isn’t that the point?”
Yagyuu turned the idea over. The directness of carrying it out with her own two hands—Niou’s hands—wasn’t unappealing. “It’ll be harder to clean up.”
“Please, between the two of us do you really think there’s anything we couldn’t pull off?”
“... Yukimura-kun,” Yagyuu said. It was more of a perfunctory gesture than anything else; she had already made up her mind.
Niou knew it too. “What the captain doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” she said. This was unlikely to stay true, but given that Yukimura was no longer in the country their grace period would be longer, potentially indefinite. Regardless, it wouldn’t be their first time lying to Yukimura and it probably would not be their last.
The rest was logistics and strategy, their mutual specialties. Their plan firmed up, fractalled along contingencies. There was a back-alley shortcut Tamagawa often took on his way home after club practice, according to Niou; it wouldn’t even be necessary to lure him out of sight and hearing. Yagyuu would handle the deed itself, and Niou would assist with the disposal. Neither of them foresaw any particular difficulties, and indeed none had arisen.
Now, Niou says, "Did you enjoy yourself, Niou-kun?"
As always, she could mean it as herself to Yagyuu, or as Yagyuu to Niou, but Yagyuu’s answer is the same either way. The flash memory of the confusion in Tamagawa’s eyes cliffdiving into terror tugs her mouth into an irrepressible smile. Warm spray of blood. Gristle, viscera. Flesh parting under the blade, the feeble resistance of muscle. She’d thought it would be more difficult. Either she’d underestimated her own athlete’s strength or she’d overestimated the solidity of a human body. Or maybe Tamagawa Yoshio was simply not a particularly ideal specimen of one.
First in the throat, to keep him quiet. Then in the stomach, because she wanted it to hurt. Then between the ribs, piercing through the lungs, to finish him off conclusively. Then twice more in the stomach, because she could. Buoyed by a surge of savagely delirious euphoria, her front drenched with blood, gripping the handle of the knife so tightly she couldn’t feel her fingers, she’d forgotten for a moment who she was, made a motion to push up a pair of glasses she wasn’t wearing. Niou’s arrival, timely after all, had settled her. It’s always easier to define herself by negative space, a mirror in which she can see what she isn’t.
“It was pretty fun,” Yagyuu says. She twirls the blade in her hand, mimicking the flashy racquet tricks Niou’s been practising lately as method acting for her Kikumaru illusion. “Would’ve been even more fun with a partner. You’re always leaving the dirty work to me.”
Niou gives her a dry look. “I believe you got more out of the act than I would have.”
“Well, are you up for a light spot of dismemberment?”
Niou kneels down, a cleaver materialising in her grip, idle sleight of hand. A tightening around the eyes: her own distaste, or her projection of Yagyuu’s? They split the work by wordless assent, Niou moving to the feet, Yagyuu to the head. The trachea is already ruptured most of the way through, so finishing the decapitation process is merely a matter of severing the spinal cord and the surrounding tissue, and then Tamagawa’s head relinquishes attachment to Tamagawa’s body. Though he’s already dead, several times over, it’s still a satisfying sight, the way an alphabetised bookshelf or a colour-coded planner is satisfying, or maybe more accurately something like the snap of trick gum catching on Marui’s fingers yet again.
Without the driving force of a heartbeat there’s little risk of further blood splatter—Yagyuu’s own clothes are already ruined beyond salvage, but she’d like to keep Niou clean—so Yagyuu moves downwards, cheerfully hacking at joints, sawing them apart. Really it’s just a grislier scaling-up of a dissection in Biology class. Even the squelch of miscellaneous bodily fluids fades into background noise, and Yagyuu finds herself humming under her breath, a tune she must have picked up from Niou.
At the other end of the corpse, Niou cuts away silently, efficiently. They reunite at the torso, now with its limbs pruned. “Chop it up, or leave it?” Yagyuu asks.
“I think we’ve done enough for the practical aspect,” Niou says. She prods at one of the stab wounds with the tip of her knife. “Unless you have any further grievances to work out?”
“It’s mostly out of my system,” Yagyuu says.
Reduced to a pile of unidentifiable body parts wrapped in a tarp, Tamagawa’s presence is much more tolerable. Yagyuu sets her knife down and stands up, straightening out of Niou’s characteristic slouch. Looking down at the mess of blood and guts, leftover adrenaline effervesces under Yagyuu’s skin, unravelling her limbs loose and weightless. A buzz at her wrists. The blood on her palms is drying, dark and tacky. There’s no further need for the charade, but Yagyuu doesn’t want to let go of Niou’s image just yet. She is still somewhere between Yagyuu and Niou, all her meticulously cultivated boundaries in disarray. Every time they switch she lets herself go a little further, and every time it’s harder to pull back. All the ugly unfettered fury and cruelty she only allows herself to experience in Niou’s guise, the barest modicum of plausible deniability. Yagyuu knows her own violence intimately, through years of sublimation; it is familiar as a childhood friend, distinctively hers, nothing like Niou’s.
Nonetheless, the flimsy pretext for release is dizzying in its relief. She’s always grateful to Niou for fishhooking it out of her, the hidden seething brutality, even as she resents the unmasking. She could have very happily lived out the rest of her life as a diligent and unremarkable girl and then a diligent and unremarkable woman, if Niou hadn’t seen her a little too clearly. Still, becoming a Rikkaidai regular has given her the unimaginably serendipitous opportunity to have her cake and eat it too. Thanks to Niou, Yagyuu can indulge while the appearance of her hands remains unsullied. At the cost of Niou’s, yes, but it isn't as if Niou is objecting. It’s the simplest damage control Yagyuu’s ever had to undertake.
So: a demonstration of that gratitude. Yagyuu steps forward, plucks Niou’s glasses off her face and tucks them into her pocket. Gently, she fits the curve of her palm to the side of Niou’s cheek, thumb to the faint smudge of Niou’s beauty mark just visible underneath the concealer, this close up.
Niou’s eyes kindle. The breathless exhilaration on her face reflecting Yagyuu’s, as if it really had been Niou in Yagyuu’s place earlier, as if their switch is rooted in something deeper and more profound than a handful of cosmetic adjustments, some alchemy of deconstruction and reconstruction at its core that enables a true exchange of self. Yagyuu slides her hand lower, curling her fingers around the column of Niou’s neck. The visible trail of her touch mapped out in dark red across Niou’s skin. Now the deed belongs to both of them. Niou’s pulse slams against the heel of Yagyuu’s palm, insistent and frantic, a dead giveaway.
“Are you scared?” Yagyuu murmurs.
“No,” Niou says.
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m the best liar,” Niou says. She tilts her head. “Or maybe I’m not. Who am I right now?”
“Does it matter?”
Niou’s eyes narrow, a thoughtful, deliberate motion. “I thought it did to you.”
Yagyuu says, with careful emphasis, “You’ve certainly been the corruptive influence.”
Niou snorts. “It’s not corruption if you were always—”
Yagyuu leans forward and kisses the rest of the words out of Niou’s mouth, feeling Niou’s heartbeat ratchet up against her hand, Niou’s body tensing up in alarm before loosening into Yagyuu’s hold. The taste of tar and ash behind Niou’s teeth, another dead giveaway. One of these days Niou will stop forcibly suppressing her body’s instincts of flight, whenever Yagyuu comes close. Perhaps she has triaged the risk and doesn't care. Perhaps she is unaccustomed to the existence of a danger greater than her own. Yagyuu remembers their first switch, Niou’s stunned delight as she’d said you’re worse than I am. How fiercely Niou has clung to that delight in the intervening period, as though to prevent it from metamorphosing into anything close to fear.
“Nobody else can know,” Yagyuu says, low. She kisses Niou again. “Only the two of us.”
“Just us,” Niou agrees. The same shocked, undisguised bliss in her voice as that first time. She sways on her feet. The slightest glint of silver visible through the strands of hair near her ears, because Yagyuu knows to look for it, those anchoring points of the true self. But it hardly makes a difference in the end; it is always the two of them, in tandem or opposition, and if she is not one then she must be the other. The closed and definitive logic of a binary system. She has enough trust in her understanding of Niou to believe that Niou feels the same.
fandom: prince of tennis
ship: yagyuu/niou (r63)
rating: m
word count: 2k
2882 indulging in a bit of bodyswapped murder and dismemberment And They Were Both Girls... inspired by beautiful perfect atmospheric roy nvgs400 art!! contains non-graphic(?) gore. i meant for this to be set in high school but i forgot my intentions partway through so it's kind of ambiguous but that is OK
--
She grows aware of Niou’s presence almost before Niou’s figure appears in the entrance to the alleyway, a sixth-sense prickle at the base of her spine. She’d call it a premonition, if she were more of the superstitious type. “You’re early, Yagyuu,” Yagyuu calls, in Niou’s lazy drawl. “I’m not done yet.”
Niou touches the bridge of her glasses. “I am always punctual, Niou-kun,” she replies.
Yagyuu grins. “Any earlier and you would’ve seen something that might offend a lady,” she says. The knife in her hand dangles loosely, its grip slippery against her fingers.
“You’ve certainly been the corruptive influence,” Niou says, walking closer. There’s not much light in the narrow alleyway, the dim vestiges of the glow from a streetlight at the other end of the passage catching on a few stray strands of her wig. “I came to see if you needed help with the cleanup.”
Tamagawa Yoshio’s corpse lies in a small dark pool of its own blood, oozing out from five stab wounds onto the tarp they’d prepared earlier. Yagyuu hadn’t planned to make things quite so messy but Niou had been right; once she started it had been too easy to keep going. She breathes in the damp, iron-scented air. She says, “Sure. Try not to faint.”
Two weeks ago, they’d been spitballing some potential variations on one of their newer play strategies in the empty classroom overlooking the courts they often requisitioned as a private discussion space when Yagyuu caught a glimpse of a pale head of hair going down to the clubroom through the window and was briefly blinded by rage.
Niou’d noticed the flicker to Yagyuu’s attention. “What’s up?”
“It’s nothing important,” Yagyuu said, tamping the irritation down. “Only that second-year alternate, Tamagawa Yoshio… I don’t approve of the way he carries himself. Presenting himself as a gentleman when he is anything but…”
Niou lifted an eyebrow. “Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Niou-kun, but I don’t appreciate people making a mockery of my area of expertise,” Yagyuu said. Then she added, mildly, “I might kill him.”
Of course Niou had zeroed in immediately on the underlying note of Yagyuu’s intent. “You’re serious about this?”
She hadn’t been sure until Niou spoke it aloud, and then she was. “Yes. I rather think I am.”
Niou’s fingers drummed out an impatient rhythm against the desk. “You’ll be me when you do it, obviously,” Niou said. “Yagyuu Hiromi’s hands will stay clean.” She said it with her typical sneer; it was difficult to tell, even for Yagyuu, if the words were laced with any additional venom or irony. Offhand: “Akaya doesn’t like him either.”
“How should we do it?” It was the plural now, or maybe had always been, the convergence inevitable. “Poison would be the most unobtrusive method—”
“Boring,” Niou dismissed. “You hate the guy, don’t you? So stab him or something. If you’re gonna murder someone, you might as well get all the mileage you can out of it.”
“Stabbing is very… personal,” Yagyuu says. “Is that something you would do? I would hate to break character.”
“Maybe,” Niou said, shrugging. “I might do anything. Isn’t that the point?”
Yagyuu turned the idea over. The directness of carrying it out with her own two hands—Niou’s hands—wasn’t unappealing. “It’ll be harder to clean up.”
“Please, between the two of us do you really think there’s anything we couldn’t pull off?”
“... Yukimura-kun,” Yagyuu said. It was more of a perfunctory gesture than anything else; she had already made up her mind.
Niou knew it too. “What the captain doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” she said. This was unlikely to stay true, but given that Yukimura was no longer in the country their grace period would be longer, potentially indefinite. Regardless, it wouldn’t be their first time lying to Yukimura and it probably would not be their last.
The rest was logistics and strategy, their mutual specialties. Their plan firmed up, fractalled along contingencies. There was a back-alley shortcut Tamagawa often took on his way home after club practice, according to Niou; it wouldn’t even be necessary to lure him out of sight and hearing. Yagyuu would handle the deed itself, and Niou would assist with the disposal. Neither of them foresaw any particular difficulties, and indeed none had arisen.
Now, Niou says, "Did you enjoy yourself, Niou-kun?"
As always, she could mean it as herself to Yagyuu, or as Yagyuu to Niou, but Yagyuu’s answer is the same either way. The flash memory of the confusion in Tamagawa’s eyes cliffdiving into terror tugs her mouth into an irrepressible smile. Warm spray of blood. Gristle, viscera. Flesh parting under the blade, the feeble resistance of muscle. She’d thought it would be more difficult. Either she’d underestimated her own athlete’s strength or she’d overestimated the solidity of a human body. Or maybe Tamagawa Yoshio was simply not a particularly ideal specimen of one.
First in the throat, to keep him quiet. Then in the stomach, because she wanted it to hurt. Then between the ribs, piercing through the lungs, to finish him off conclusively. Then twice more in the stomach, because she could. Buoyed by a surge of savagely delirious euphoria, her front drenched with blood, gripping the handle of the knife so tightly she couldn’t feel her fingers, she’d forgotten for a moment who she was, made a motion to push up a pair of glasses she wasn’t wearing. Niou’s arrival, timely after all, had settled her. It’s always easier to define herself by negative space, a mirror in which she can see what she isn’t.
“It was pretty fun,” Yagyuu says. She twirls the blade in her hand, mimicking the flashy racquet tricks Niou’s been practising lately as method acting for her Kikumaru illusion. “Would’ve been even more fun with a partner. You’re always leaving the dirty work to me.”
Niou gives her a dry look. “I believe you got more out of the act than I would have.”
“Well, are you up for a light spot of dismemberment?”
Niou kneels down, a cleaver materialising in her grip, idle sleight of hand. A tightening around the eyes: her own distaste, or her projection of Yagyuu’s? They split the work by wordless assent, Niou moving to the feet, Yagyuu to the head. The trachea is already ruptured most of the way through, so finishing the decapitation process is merely a matter of severing the spinal cord and the surrounding tissue, and then Tamagawa’s head relinquishes attachment to Tamagawa’s body. Though he’s already dead, several times over, it’s still a satisfying sight, the way an alphabetised bookshelf or a colour-coded planner is satisfying, or maybe more accurately something like the snap of trick gum catching on Marui’s fingers yet again.
Without the driving force of a heartbeat there’s little risk of further blood splatter—Yagyuu’s own clothes are already ruined beyond salvage, but she’d like to keep Niou clean—so Yagyuu moves downwards, cheerfully hacking at joints, sawing them apart. Really it’s just a grislier scaling-up of a dissection in Biology class. Even the squelch of miscellaneous bodily fluids fades into background noise, and Yagyuu finds herself humming under her breath, a tune she must have picked up from Niou.
At the other end of the corpse, Niou cuts away silently, efficiently. They reunite at the torso, now with its limbs pruned. “Chop it up, or leave it?” Yagyuu asks.
“I think we’ve done enough for the practical aspect,” Niou says. She prods at one of the stab wounds with the tip of her knife. “Unless you have any further grievances to work out?”
“It’s mostly out of my system,” Yagyuu says.
Reduced to a pile of unidentifiable body parts wrapped in a tarp, Tamagawa’s presence is much more tolerable. Yagyuu sets her knife down and stands up, straightening out of Niou’s characteristic slouch. Looking down at the mess of blood and guts, leftover adrenaline effervesces under Yagyuu’s skin, unravelling her limbs loose and weightless. A buzz at her wrists. The blood on her palms is drying, dark and tacky. There’s no further need for the charade, but Yagyuu doesn’t want to let go of Niou’s image just yet. She is still somewhere between Yagyuu and Niou, all her meticulously cultivated boundaries in disarray. Every time they switch she lets herself go a little further, and every time it’s harder to pull back. All the ugly unfettered fury and cruelty she only allows herself to experience in Niou’s guise, the barest modicum of plausible deniability. Yagyuu knows her own violence intimately, through years of sublimation; it is familiar as a childhood friend, distinctively hers, nothing like Niou’s.
Nonetheless, the flimsy pretext for release is dizzying in its relief. She’s always grateful to Niou for fishhooking it out of her, the hidden seething brutality, even as she resents the unmasking. She could have very happily lived out the rest of her life as a diligent and unremarkable girl and then a diligent and unremarkable woman, if Niou hadn’t seen her a little too clearly. Still, becoming a Rikkaidai regular has given her the unimaginably serendipitous opportunity to have her cake and eat it too. Thanks to Niou, Yagyuu can indulge while the appearance of her hands remains unsullied. At the cost of Niou’s, yes, but it isn't as if Niou is objecting. It’s the simplest damage control Yagyuu’s ever had to undertake.
So: a demonstration of that gratitude. Yagyuu steps forward, plucks Niou’s glasses off her face and tucks them into her pocket. Gently, she fits the curve of her palm to the side of Niou’s cheek, thumb to the faint smudge of Niou’s beauty mark just visible underneath the concealer, this close up.
Niou’s eyes kindle. The breathless exhilaration on her face reflecting Yagyuu’s, as if it really had been Niou in Yagyuu’s place earlier, as if their switch is rooted in something deeper and more profound than a handful of cosmetic adjustments, some alchemy of deconstruction and reconstruction at its core that enables a true exchange of self. Yagyuu slides her hand lower, curling her fingers around the column of Niou’s neck. The visible trail of her touch mapped out in dark red across Niou’s skin. Now the deed belongs to both of them. Niou’s pulse slams against the heel of Yagyuu’s palm, insistent and frantic, a dead giveaway.
“Are you scared?” Yagyuu murmurs.
“No,” Niou says.
“You’re a bad liar.”
“I’m the best liar,” Niou says. She tilts her head. “Or maybe I’m not. Who am I right now?”
“Does it matter?”
Niou’s eyes narrow, a thoughtful, deliberate motion. “I thought it did to you.”
Yagyuu says, with careful emphasis, “You’ve certainly been the corruptive influence.”
Niou snorts. “It’s not corruption if you were always—”
Yagyuu leans forward and kisses the rest of the words out of Niou’s mouth, feeling Niou’s heartbeat ratchet up against her hand, Niou’s body tensing up in alarm before loosening into Yagyuu’s hold. The taste of tar and ash behind Niou’s teeth, another dead giveaway. One of these days Niou will stop forcibly suppressing her body’s instincts of flight, whenever Yagyuu comes close. Perhaps she has triaged the risk and doesn't care. Perhaps she is unaccustomed to the existence of a danger greater than her own. Yagyuu remembers their first switch, Niou’s stunned delight as she’d said you’re worse than I am. How fiercely Niou has clung to that delight in the intervening period, as though to prevent it from metamorphosing into anything close to fear.
“Nobody else can know,” Yagyuu says, low. She kisses Niou again. “Only the two of us.”
“Just us,” Niou agrees. The same shocked, undisguised bliss in her voice as that first time. She sways on her feet. The slightest glint of silver visible through the strands of hair near her ears, because Yagyuu knows to look for it, those anchoring points of the true self. But it hardly makes a difference in the end; it is always the two of them, in tandem or opposition, and if she is not one then she must be the other. The closed and definitive logic of a binary system. She has enough trust in her understanding of Niou to believe that Niou feels the same.
