“Shey, calm down… fuck, stay still, ugh…!”

A fist was a fist, even when it belonged to him. As Ruslan took the beating, it still hurt, if not terribly. When he tried to grab Shey’s forearm and calm him down, a leg flew up instead and kicked at him. Ruslan, kicked in the shoulder, shouted in an irritable voice.

“Damn it, do whatever you want! Beat me until you feel better!”

He couldn’t understand why Shey was freaking out again over nothing when he hadn’t even eaten. Since he was going to throw a fit anyway, Ruslan simply lay sprawled out and let him have at it. Shey climbed on top of him and panted harshly, his eyes red with rage.

Ruslan only looked up at that face with a calm expression, thinking that it was no wonder Shey couldn’t put on weight when he made such a fuss. Then, suddenly, a clear, hot liquid dropped over Ruslan’s face.

“…What did I ever do to you, that was so wrong?”

When he wiped his cheek, moisture clung to his fingers. Shey had lowered his head, and only the round crown of it was visible.

“Why do I keep… ugh… why do you keep doing this to people…”

Shey choked out a sob. Tears streamed without pause over Ruslan’s beautiful, strange face.

Ruslan wiped away the tears that kept soaking his cheek, as though watching something he had never seen before. Then, seeming to think about something deeply, he tilted his jaw to the side.

“Why? Because you think it’s dirty?”

Shey lifted his head. There was no mistaking the confusion in his tear-wet eyes at the sudden question. Ruslan smiled at him, looking as calm as ever, but with an expression full of a desire to resolve the question in his own way.

“I don’t care. Being dirty is fine.”

Ruslan seemed a little baffled, as if wondering what the problem even was. He had thought Shey was losing it in the middle of the day for no reason, but it seemed he was quite upset just because he’d wet himself a little.

He knew Shey disliked it, but he usually bore with it well enough, and Shey himself also pissed on Ruslan’s body when he got excited, so he hadn’t expected him to make such a scene.

In any case, even if he was like this for now, once he soothed him a bit he would obediently settle down, as though nothing had happened. It was always that way. This was just one of his regularly recurring fits.

Ruslan gently kneaded Shey’s ass, telling him to calm down. Shey’s face, soaked through with tears, had gone pale as if he had seen a ghost.

“Ha…”

And then, with a face chafed raw around the eyes, he broke into a laugh of disbelief.

“Ahahaha!”

Shey erupted into a fit of laughter, clutching his stomach. Even Ruslan, who was not especially sensitive to other people’s emotions, could tell at once that this laughter was different from usual.

After laughing like that for a long while, Shey looked down at Ruslan with a completely expressionless face, all traces of color drained from him.

“You really don’t know anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My body.”

Shey murmured in a lifeless voice.

“Shey.”

“This is my body. This is my body…!”

Aaah!

Suddenly Shey screamed and hit his own head, shouting. As he screamed, another Shey, unable to understand the situation, tilted his head in confusion.

In truth, if Shey simply changed his mind, everything would become easy. It would be convenient to think of himself as a bug. Shey was a human being less than a bug, and therefore a living human pest was an object of disgust or a midday amusement, someone whose antennae and legs deserved to be torn off alive. In short, Ruslan was merely carrying out the proper task.

So Shey should humbly accept it and obey, but it felt as though the center of his chest were burning and he were drinking scalding molten metal. He heard the sound of some ugly beast being caught somewhere, and looked around before realizing it was coming from his own mouth. The lines of tears on his cheeks met at his chin and fell downward again. He did not know why he was crying.

“I told you I hated it. I begged you to stop, hundreds of times, thousands of times! What else am I supposed to do? Tell me!”

“Shey.”

“Do you want to break me that badly? Am I that horrifying? Do you hate even looking at me? Then just kill me instead!”

“Horrifying?”

Ruslan, who was never flustered, rose up. A troubled look flickered across his tidy face. It was something he had never once imagined. He had repeated over and over that he loved Shey so much he would not be able to let him go even after death, so had Shey simply been out of his mind and failed to understand?

“There’s no way. Why would I think of you as horrifying?”

How could you think such a wicked thing? So that’s why you didn’t love me.

He had never, not once, even thought of the absurd option of killing him. He hadn’t even deliberately tried to break him. There were times when he got angry because his feelings weren’t getting through. At those times, he admitted he had done some rough things to Shey. But hadn’t he always been proving himself the whole time?

He swore on everything that he had never tormented Shey because he hated him or found him disagreeable. Quite the opposite. It made him resentful that the person he loved so much, enough to burn his heart to ash, would trust nothing and accept nothing. So maybe he had been rough without meaning to.

“I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

Only after the fact did Shey realize that unlike himself, Ruslan had lived a life full of uncertainty and had dealt with a delicate profession. Apologies came too easily and too routinely. For Shey, it was a phrase he was certain he would never hear, even in death.

“What?”

“I’m sorry. So calm down.”

Ruslan bruShey the disheveled hair behind Shey’s ear with gentle fingers, as if saying that if it hurt him so much, then he could apologize as many times as he wanted.

“Don’t wear yourself out first thing in the day. You haven’t even eaten.”

“You’re apologizing…?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. It was my fault, so calm down now.”

Ruslan soothed him easily, as if he could apologize as many times as necessary if that was what Shey wanted.

“Let’s get up. Want to wash up? Or should we eat something first and then wash? Better to eat first and wash after.”

Having made the decision as he spoke, Ruslan tried to lift Shey up. But a sharp scraping sound came first. The one who had been struck on the hand raised one eyebrow crookedly. His patience was beginning to run thin as well.

“What am I calming down from?”

“Let’s stop.”

“Look at me.”

Shey frantically pulled open his clothes, exposing his dry chest. The skin, thoroughly bitten and chewed, was packed with bite marks until no trace of white flesh remained.

There were still crusted blood on the bitten neck, and around the nipples, tooth marks had left their chaotic traces. On his lower abdomen, the bruises from Ruslan’s rough hands were slowly fading to yellow.

“You say you love me?”

The sarcastic murmur sounded, at first glance, like a criticism of the one who had done this, but in truth it was closer to mocking himself.

“There’s no way a monster like you would know a feeling like that.”

His cheeks, dried with tears, felt rough and parched. Shey gave a twisted grin.

“You just think I’m entertaining. Interesting. Novel. So you can’t stand not having me.”

“I told you to stop.”

“Even if everyone in the world knew what love was!”

Suddenly Shey shouted. His voice trembled from all the anger accumulated over a long time.

“Not you.”

“Shut up.”

“You never loved me.”

Ruslan’s eyes gleamed dangerously. From long experience, Shey knew that whenever he showed this expression, something horrible inevitably followed.

And yet Shey could not stop. It felt as though some madness were urging him on. Even if Ruslan cut him apart and chewed up every piece of flesh at this moment, he felt like he could laugh at him.

“There’s no way you could do something like that…”

The mocking sentence crumbled weakly away. The silence that surrounded them was as dangerous as walking on a sheet of thin ice.

With an expressionless face, Ruslan looked at Shey and reached out a hand. Shey did not dodge, even though he knew exactly what that hand would do.

“Aah!”

“I told you to shut up.”

“Hhh, huh…”

His head slammed against the cold plaster wall. Everything before his eyes went black. His vision was completely swallowed by darkness. In this world, only Ruslan’s voice remained.

Thud! Thud!

“Aaah! Ah, ngh, ah, ah, it hurts… It hurts…”

Ruslan slammed the head of his beloved lover against the wall again and again, breathing hard. His fingertips were trembling. Huhhh, huhhh. The breaths he forced out made it clear he was trying hard to restrain his excitement.

“I don’t love you?”

“Ah… ah…”

“Shey. I’m the one who wants to ask you. What more do I have to prove?”

Ruslan was genuinely curious. Why on earth was he the only one for whom this bond mattered?

“When did I ever ask you to love me? Fuck, I’m just saying, just please stay by my side. Is that so hard?”

Ruslan had realized all at once, like light falling into darkness, but why was Shey still denying it?

“I proved everything because you didn’t believe me. I tried!”

You’re just going to abandon me when you get tired of me anyway.

“Me? Shey?”

“I understood you were insecure. I understood every time you shook people half to death by gripping their lives and waving them around!”

I don’t care what form you take. Is it hard to believe?

Ruslan, please, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to. Tell those people to go. Please, Ruslan!

Shey, stay still.

Ah… ah… stop, please, ah! Aaaah!

That’s enough now, right? I’m not leaving you. So stop talking nonsense.

Blood clung to his long lashes. Shey closed his eyes against the dizzying blur and gave a crooked smile. Behind him, the beast that knew only how to lick the wounds it had made was shrieking in a frenzy. The cries of what more am I supposed to do sounded far away, as though they were coming from some distant place.

Hh… kh…”

I’ve never abandoned you, no matter what state you were in. Have I ever done that? Answer me.

Destroying a person’s soul was this simple.

“Shey, you’re wrong. I love you.”

Ruslan murmured once more with an expressionless face. I love you. Shey felt as though the words had been stitched directly into his ears. His confession was like boiling molten metal, pouring into the eardrums and annihilating sound like snake venom, leaving him deaf.