moog: This was hard for me to write because I don't really ship this pairing; in fact, this pairing makes me downright uncomfortable for several reasons that I won't go into. I actually wrote this because it was requested from me a long time ago (sorry it took so long!). It was an interesting project, because it gave me a chance to explore Kida's character. I'm not too pleased with the result, because the idea was really layered and I left a lot out...but it will suffice for now. Also sex. You have been warned. (This was also largely inspired by the writing of Virginia Woolf).

Soundtrack: "Skin of the Night" by M83

Disclaimer: I'm still fighting a losing battle.

There was nothing gentle about it, except for the very beginning.

Funny things, tongues, how soft they are, how strong. Tongues navigate the way past closed lips. Tongues bed other tongues, are the closest of lovers, and suddenly "swapping saliva"—remember primary school, when all you could think about was cooties?—well, suddenly it's a miracle. Nothing is better than that first tender grazing of tongues. Kida treasured that moment, that shy dance, because it all spun out of control too quickly, too soon after.

Lips got involved, then teeth, then hands; and not all hands are so careful as tongues.

Kida's hands were not careful. Kida's hands wanted to hurt. His very first time (first, at least, in regards to this situation), he was surprised to learn this about himself—how viciously his fingers scratched, how heavily they pressed against flesh, how cruelly they knotted into hapless strands of hair. His hands did not have the love his tongue did. If asked, he would not have been able to say why, exactly, this was so—only that the brutality of his hands (even if he wasn't aware of it until after the fact, tracing bruises and scratches with his lips) quenched the near insatiable thirst in him to take, take, take. And when everything that could possibly be taken was finally his, he would take some more.

And in the meanwhile, tongues slid, lips glided, hands tore apart.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing of all—frustrating because he'd been certain that if anyone knew the meaning of gentle, it sure as hell wasn't Izaya—well, Izaya was not as rough. Everything—the pale hand trailing down Kida's ribs to settle in the crook of his hip, the lips closing like petals over his earlobe—every minute movement of Izaya's was calculated, premeditated, executed with studious precision, all meant to serve one goal and one goal alone: to make Kida weak.

Who could blame his hands, then, for taking charge when Kida's mind pulled a series of blanks (Izaya's tongue found the hollow between Kida's jaw and the top of his throat; Kida let out a sharp breath and raked his nails across the offender's shoulder blade); who could blame his hands for defending their insensible owner from such humiliation as came with the total renunciation of self-control? If Izaya wanted anything from these, their shared moments, it was that—to dominate Kida's will; to make Kida submit.

Kida's hands would not allow that.

(As Izaya's careful fingers fluttered down, down, down, Kida gasped; he saw nothing more beyond the red and white flashes behind his eyes. The breath in his lungs, in Izaya's lungs, burned like fire).

Nothing about their first meeting seemed unusual, but whenever Kida recalls it now he is sure there was a flicker of foreboding in the air. Something about Izaya's grin, maybe, or the way Saki stood just so, silent, smiling at her feet. Maybe it came from within—in the tightening of his chest, the hitching of his breath, the locking of his knees. The chemical adrenaline swirling in his blood like a cyclone, urging him to run, run, run.

"I met someone strange today," he'd told a friend later, and he explained all the things he'd felt.

Lookit-you-go grin. Friendly elbow to the ribs.

"Sounds like you're in love."

Kida couldn't even laugh. He couldn't put into words that it had felt more like he'd been cornered by some sort of starving leopard, or a snake. How was he to know all that that meeting would cost him (all it would wrench away)?

(At present, in the restaurant with Anri and Mikado, his hand tightens around his drink).

Saki was beautiful. That's all he was thinking at the time. She was beautiful, and he wanted her like he had never wanted a girl before. The wispy flick of her hair as it caught the sunlight, the pale gleam of her skin—it looked soft as starlight. The unassuming curve where the side of her throat met her shoulder. All of these things drove Kida mad. Little by little, he let himself fall into her hands.

But not too much.

For Kida was always aware of the shade lurking like a film of oil just beneath the surface of Saki's brink-of-melting eyes. Every breath off her sensuous lips was laced with that shadow's name. In every dainty kindergarten kiss—because with Saki he was gentle, so, so gentle—he was convinced he could taste something other, something at the corner of her mouth that was not quite vanilla lip balm.

(Smoke, he reflected, stirring his soda, laughing at something naïve Mikado said. Not cigar smoke, or cigarette smoke, but wood smoke. Incense burning. A house on fire.)

Even the texture of Saki's lips—soft as freshly budded leaves, flawless as satin, and fuller—sent a chill coursing down his throat and through his chest to pool like a frozen teardrop between his ribs.

With her, everything was about Izaya. Kida should have listened to his restless hands (even then they sensed the danger; his fingers were always twitching against his folded arms, drumming anxiety against a railing, his desk, his thigh). He should have run when he had the chance. But Saki was so beautiful.

Izaya said. Izaya told me. Izaya thinks I should.

Kida is unsure at which point the insistent "I shoulds" became "we shoulds." He tries to remember, but thinking about it makes his skin crawl. It makes his head pound and the world swim. It seems to him now that that had always been the case, considering he couldn't call up a time during which he hadn't been under Izaya's thumb.

Ever since I was born he thought (pinching his soda straw between his thumb and forefinger, twisting it, pretending to listen to the story Mikado directed at Anri). Destiny, he thought. Fate.

But that was just an excuse not to take responsibility for what he willingly bit into, for what he craved; an excuse to give the wolf control over the shattered glass and the broken bones.

As for the reason that Izaya found him interesting enough to bother with at all, Kida really couldn't say. Not at first, anyway.

"He can't resist me," he once joked to Saki. "I'm just that good-looking."

"Yes," she giggled. "You really are." She held his hand, brought his knuckles to her lips. His chest tightened.

For the longest time (at least, on the surface of things), his acquaintance with Izaya was harmless; enough so that Kida, despite any foreboding he may have felt about the man in the shadows, knew a vague kind of bliss during the early days of his relationship with Saki Mikajima. He was able, for the most part, to ignore the nagging sensation that it wasn't really Saki whom he was dating; for every word she spoke, he was sure, came from Izaya. Every morsel of information about himself he offered her, every word she drank off of his lips, was relayed back to the informant to be filtered, dissected, and subsequently returned.

"Izaya says you're being childish. Izaya thinks you're too naïve."

Well, Kida couldn't deny those claims, no matter how much they ruffled him. He was only fifteen, after all, proudly caught in the ripe whims of youth. He was a street smart gang boss. He had a beautiful girl to call his own. He was on top of the world as he knew it. And Saki's smile, a perpetually amused smirk, lifted him even higher.

More alluring still were those moments of peace he felt when Saki was with him. There was an understanding in Saki's voice and manner that he had never encountered before; not with his parents; not with the other Yellow Scarves; not with Mikado. It was in the softly reverent way she spoke his name—"Masaomi"—as she curled into his embraces. It was in the way she tightly clutched his hand to comfort him, even when he was smiling; especially when he was smiling. It was in the way that, when he rested his head upon her lap, her fingers fluttered through his hair as she hummed him to sleep.

Ever since he could remember, Kida had been at odds with himself and, in some form or another, with everyone around him. It was as though, from the moment of his birth, he could do nothing but contend with the world. He had to be the funniest. He had to be the friendliest. He had to be the boldest. Never, since his memory began, had he felt comfortable in his own skin (a boy like Mikado, who lived his life in wide-eyed wonderment and general simplicity, drew Kida to him like a moth to a light; but for the exact same reason, Kida hated him—or rather, he hated to glimpse his own reflection parading like a pomp in Mikado's bright eyes).

Saki was different. She was perfect, not because he didn't have to put up a front for her; if anything, when it came to Saki, Kida had never put on a greater show in his life. Yet no matter what act Kida chose to put on, Saki Mikajima saw straight through him every time. No matter how daring his words, and regardless of his bold grin, Saki's eyes peeled back his bravado and delved deep into his core. Despite the child she surely saw there, and despite the glaring immaturities, she accepted him as he was—a feat Kida himself never managed to accomplish. Despite the mask he kept always between them, it was not long before his beating heart was in her hand.

(Always he had been aware of the beast in the background, the grinning wolf, the eyes of blood and ice. A mistake, pretending his apprehension was imagined; or perhaps the thrill of it was…)

Did he love her?

No.

He felt loved, though, and that was all that was necessary to convince him that he'd found the girl he would spend his life with. For if he could not love himself, why not let somebody else try for him?

How cruelly calculated it all was. But then, Kida mused, he had no one to blame but himself.

"I'll protect you," he told her. "No matter what, I'll protect you with these hands."

A young boy's hands. Hands that had carried no more than the weight of adolescent sorrows.

"Of course you will," she replied, brushing his hair behind his ear. A lingering kiss on the cheek. The most nurturing smile. "Of course you will, my brave hero."

He holds his breath and counts.

One—the slow navigation of Izaya's fingers, trailing taunts along his length.

Two—the softness of Izaya's tongue, the careful push of it against Kida's lips and the shy slide of it along his teeth; so wary, so tentative; almost chaste; as though the slightest exertion of force would cause Kida to break.

Three—Izaya's heartbeat, resounding against Kida's chest; the quickening of it when Kida's lips brush against Izaya's throat.

Four—the paleness of the other's skin, the dark splotches where Kida's fingertips made their mark emerging like black shadows against new snow.

Five—the mockery in Izaya's eyes. A sinister light that turns Kida's kisses into bites.

"Cry all you want to," he'd said when Kida glowered at him. "You're not going to do anything about it, though, are you? You're going to sit there and do whatever I say, like always. It's a shame that you turned out to be so unexpectedly boring. I had high hopes for you, young leader of the Yellow Scarves, but—ah, well. You're only a child, after all. I would almost say I feel sorry for Mikajima, but for whatever reason she seems to like you. It's incomprehensible to me, but women are pitiable creatures to begin with, wouldn't you say? They fall for the same idiocy every time."

Kida clenched his fists, seething.

"You…She trusted you, and you…"

Izaya laughed, a bubbling sound so unrestrained, so full of mirth, that it was almost innocent—like a child at a playground. Kida's stomach lurched. A taste like bile settled in his throat.

Saki was in the hospital—the girl he couldn't protect, the girl he couldn't even bring himself to visit, was wasting away alone, and here, in the detached crystal ball of his office, Izaya laughed.

"No one forced her to do anything," Izaya trilled. "Just like no one is forcing you. You could have saved her, but your cowardice won out. That is not my fault, nor is it my problem. You made your choices. They had their consequences. Welcome to the world of adults."

The world you fabricated, Kida ached to say. Your world, not mine. I never wanted this. I never wanted…

His shaking knees detained him. Tighter and tighter, his fists clenched.

(He is walking home with Mikado and Anri. He just manages to spurt out the beginning of a joke when, in reflex to his memories, his hands stiffen in his pockets. Misinterpreting Kida's sudden silence as memory loss, Mikado attempts to save face with Anri by launching into a tale about Kida's poor relationship with humor.)

How had he done it? He must have been out of his mind.

He recalls flashes, red and white, going off in his head, and the world moving beneath him. He ignored the trembling of his knees and the shivering of his heart. In that moment, his hands and feet took over. Five long strides. That brought him near face-to-face with the man who made puppets of human beings. Between them lay only a desk, and Kida's arm shot across it like a whip. His fingers knotted into the collar of Izaya's shirt. Izaya's eyes—sharp, disarming, and so, so close—cut through Kida's gaze like the unwavering point of a knife. The smell of fur and snow and city air clung sharp to the informant's body; even then, Kida could hardly help but drink it in; even then, their breaths mingled, and Kida felt himself grow weak.

(The memory of it is potent yet; Kida's face goes hot, even as his chest tightens and a chill courses his spine. He turns his face to the stars, the better to hide it from his friends.)

The rage fire ringing his heart had extinguished without warning, leaving behind a hollow ache. The embers dropped like hail into his stomach. His knees gave out at last. His fingers lost their grasp, and he sunk to the floor.

"Like I said," Izaya purred. "Cry all you want. It won't change a thing."

Yet there were no tears forthcoming; for it wasn't sadness that Kida felt. Apathy, he'd presumed—but he knows better now. The weight in his chest, the crushing void that threated to swallow him whole from the inside out—it had been his overwhelming awareness that he was, wholly and truly, alone.

Loneliness—a state worse than death.

Isolation from the billions upon billions of human beings trudging under the weight of existence; standing among them in a box made of two-way mirrors, reaching for them with every strand of his soul, yet knowing that they beheld no more in his eyes than their own reflections.

It was loneliness he felt, and a fear so stifling it wrung his will from him in a breathless laugh.

(Evening is deep now. Mikado is asking a question, but Kida can't hear it because his heart is pounding and his throat is tight. The question is mainly directed at Anri, anyway. Most of Mikado's words are.)

What was the reason for his fear? To this day Kida cannot think of it. Was he afraid of Izaya, who understood his weaknesses better than anyone, and who rolled them like raindrops in the palm of his hand? Was he afraid of Saki, of going to her on his knees only to be turned away for a coward and a failure? Or could it be (he wondered with the smallest of smiles) that he was afraid to be forgiven?

(Yes, he thought, choking on his laughter. That must be it.

Soon, Mikado and Anri will leave him. Kida finds himself on the verge of inviting Mikado to stay over for the night…But no. He can't be as clingy as that.)

Six—Izaya's pleasured gasps leave him breathless, each and every time; a voice so helpless, so eager; an intimate melody without a single word, pleading for more, more, more.

His first time with Saki is a harshly lit nightmare burned into his memory. He doesn't recall thinking, only feeling—and he felt her with every nerve.

It had been Izaya's idea, of course.

Of course.

Saki never did anything without his say-so. Running away, that had been Izaya's idea too—all to put Kida in the quiet girl's deft hands; all the simpler to pin him beneath Izaya's claws.

She came to him with soft kisses, gently twining her fingers in his hand. "He wants us to," she'd murmured. "He thinks it's time."

She had smelled of lavender and warm laundry, of spring leaves, of all things clean and new. Her tongue tasted like water, her smooth skin like the sea.

He never touched her, not once, but Saki knew exactly what to do, and she didn't wait for his permission (not that he had tried very hard to stop her; he made some joke out of it, to hide how nervous he was—she'd smiled at that; she smiled at all things). Unlike him, she was unrestrained.

Even now, his body remembers better than his head. The way she straddled him, stroked his face; the puff of her breath against his ear as she whispered, "It's okay. It'll be okay."

The ice pooling in his gut, his fingers twisting in the sheets instead of in her hair.

The painful lurch of his stomach that preceded his getting sick all over the floor once they were done. He hadn't even had the energy to be humiliated.

(Humiliation finds him now, though. His stomach flips; his hands sweat and shake).

It was a downward spiral, all of it, from the very beginning. Kida slipped once, right into the muzzle of the wolf, and after that there was no escape.

"I heard you were ill," Izaya mocked, after the fact. His white teeth gleamed cruelly, hungrily. "Do you find girls that unappealing?"

Not girls, Kida thought, pausing to press the heels of his palms into his eyes. Only this. Only you.

(Mikado and Anri wave goodbye, and it's hard, so hard, to let them go. The sky is too dark, and the night is still so young.)

Seven—moving inside of him, being a part of him, being, for just a few moments, needed, wanted, in control.

Izaya clings to him, so warm, warmer than anything and closer, and Kida thinks that both of them may melt.

When was it that it all fell to pieces?

Not just his relationship with Saki, which he suspected had never been whole to begin with; nor even his relationships with Anri and Mikado (people with their own secrets that he wasn't a part of, secrets they fought to protect him from—wasn't that rich?).

When did he, Kida Masaomi, part-time runaway, leader of the Yellow Scarves, the Boy Who Smiled, fall to so many glittering pieces?

(He's on his own. It's dark out, yet the streets are teeming. It is never still here, never still, and he can't help but feel that the whole city is a trap, flowing to the rhythm of a cruel god's cruel mind. The thought would make him laugh, if not for sharp edge of panic crawling slowly up from his belly to his chest.

Nestled in his pockets, his hands tremble.

He wants, so badly, but he doesn't know what. His hands want too—too much, too fiercely, and that he understands. He directs his footsteps, leaving the quick monotony of their tread to linger in the evening.)

Maybe he'd been in pieces all along, a mere mosaic on the roadside undone by too many fingers prying, prying, prying all the loose stones apart.

Eight—the smell of winter on his throat, the musky bath soap, the taste of rain and blood and semen. Blood from the biting. Rain from the storm.

Nine—the climax, holding tight to each other for dear life at the fading world, and then collapsing in a warm tangle of limbs and sheets; the chaste flicker of tongues over lips and teeth that turns to a hungry embrace.

Somehow, he always comes back to this—to this man, to this place. His feet lead him here, but it's his hands that really know the way. It's his hands that guide him forward, that knot into the informant's coat and pull him close.

Izaya never says a word. He falls freely, every time, into Kida's starving hands. Even if he's busy, even if he was just on his way out, Kida only need appear to own him for a night, two nights, a week.

Loving Izaya is not like loving Saki, Kida muses—if it can be called love at all; Kida laughs at that, and the corner of Izaya's mouth curls upwards in a smirk.

There is nothing gentle about it. There was never anything gentle about it.

Not their first time, when they fought for dominance in an alley where an intoxicated thug lay passed out beside a dumpster; not the second time, on a table at a park under a lamp that had shorted out; not the third, fourth, or fifth time, or any time after. It had always been a battle of teeth and of hands.

Kida hardly recalls how it all began, but he knew how it would end. He knew that it must end. Izaya Orihara, like everything else, was just another thing that Kida could not hold on to. One day, this, too, would slip through his fingers, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Like Saki, like Mikado, Izaya would leave him. They always, always left him.

(And in the desperate moment his fear comes back, cutting through the white hot pleasure with a red knife; the hands that want destruction slip into Izaya's hair, tilting his head back, giving Kida's tongue access to the pale line of Izaya's jaw. The panic builds, and the hatred; Kida draws their bodies closer, closer, closer.

To forget, just for a moment; to become nothing but pure sensation, just for a moment—that was all he wanted. That was all he could ask for, until that was wrenched away from him too; but not tonight. Not tonight.).

His name on Izaya's lips is not like his name on Saki's lips. It is heavier. It shatters the glass and cuts closer to the truth. His name on Saki's lips is sunlight that melts the mask. On Izaya's lips, it is ice that draws blood.

Not so different, love and hate. And Kida hates him, hates him.

One day his hands will do more than bruise. His teeth will more than draw blood. One day Izaya will no longer be a part of his story, a part of his life…

But not tonight.

Tonight he will laugh, and breathe, and feel with all of his soul, a glass marionette dancing with a wolf.

Ten—lying side-by-side in the stillness. The darkness hides them. Their hands are intertwined.

END