Curate, connect, and discover
❛ you’re a fucking nightmare. kiss me. ❜ (sugimoto @ ogata) let the rivalmance begin
during winter, when anglerfish was available, his mother cooked for a father that would never come.
in these periods of lucidness, she would always tell him the same “he will come, you see… i have to make his favorite food. it’s a long way from the north, so he will be hungry.”
he’d heard from her, too, about the relentless winter in hokkaido, of the mountains that surrounded his father’s base and he’d always imagined what it would be like to descend from a frozen land to the noticeably warmer weather of ibaraki. he imagined it would go like this: his father, the shining medals — his lieutenant general uniform pristine and ironed as he saw it in the bromide his mother kept atop her vanity, in the corner of their room. wrought in the finest metals, he would step inside, and he’d greet her, like lovers do in books, the stories he’s heard other children tell about their own parents. about the way their fathers kissed their mothers at the doorstep.
and they would sit at the low-table, pouring his portion in their finest plates. would his father nod approvingly after tasting mother’s molten love in the nabe’s broth? or would he go about it silently, like ogata did? quiet enjoyment, because there’s no use saying these things, his mother barely spoke a word back. but maybe this time would be different. she’d be talkative, serene; she often reminded him of a butterfly. fragile and beautiful.
but he’d been around nine-years-old, and naive.
love did not exist. not as people painted it. it’s instinct, swirling egos, the necessity to have something that will bend beneath your palm at will. it’s vulnerability, and ogata abhors anything that puts him at a disadvantage. on some night, sugimto watches him, amber eyes possessing a quiet certainty about something that makes ogata’s stomach turn, an absolute belief that whatever it is that sugimoto sees, what he thinks he sees in ogata, is only but a projection of his own deluded fantasies.
ogata held sugimoto’s gaze, lips taut and his face a blank canvas. sugimoto’s lips taste of sake, of herbs; his scars are more vivid up close, as though slashed only moments prior, like they would bleed at any moment. he could feel the part that split sugimoto’s mouth in halves brush against his skin, humid, forcefully pressing forth, but ogata doesn’t budge. staring down sugimoto’s face, like he would do to a target through the lens of his type 30 arisaka.
what would his innards look like? if he shot sugimoto now, here, in the quiet of the wilderness, with the rest cramped up in the kotan like snakes in a pit, would that rouse any of them up? he could pretend they’d been attacked, that a spy from the 7th division followed their trail, right up here, and ogata had no other choice but to kill both.
load of bullshit, there’s no way that asirpa brat would believe it.
“afraid you’ll bleed?” he settles for this: in a swift movement, ogata’s hand clasps around sugimoto’s jaw, his thumb burying itself deep in the dent of sugimoto’s facial scars, and if he willed it, ogata could probably pluck one of his eyes out. sugimoto’s reflexes are quick, blood-shot adrenalin, an elbow to ogata’s ribs. that’s when his expressionless mask finally breaks, because he knows this, he knows anger, he knows what a starving beast looks like driven to a corner. ogata smiles, teeth showing through thinned lips. “i guess not.”
“quit playing, sugimoto, and get to what we came here for. i don’t know how long you’ll try to keep playing house, just don’t waste my time.”