Letters from the Underground // fyozai

iii. lover

warnings:
• implicit (?) sexual content
• mention of a (dazai-typical) suicide attempt

notes:
• Ōoka River (大岡川, Ōoka-gawa) is a river that flows through Yokohama, Japan.
• art by ares_txt on twitter

—

Fyodor plays his cello until his wrist numbers over. The sounds the strings bleed out are so real, almost tactile in how they fill each crevice of his space, replacing not only every air particle around him, but flowing silky through his very being—unrestricted to his auditory canal but also filling his frozen-over yet dry veins.

The serenity of the music does not meander; the notes and the waves quicksilver through his nerves, granting him the only relief he's ever known from the constant, massive influx of environmental vigilance to his every sense.

Closing his eyes, he breathes in the tranquillity as every last drop of the overwhelming, painful awareness is completely drowned out by The St. Matthew Passion; beautifully poured into and over him by his sole paramour.

He stretches his neck, letting his head fall back in bliss, his exposed throat an utmost display of respect and vulnerability to the instrument—the lover, and it does not dither before it engulfs the offered skin with song. This is adoration. This is intimacy.

Fyodor has lived his share of romance in the endless lands that miserable, melancholic littérateurs have retched out onto each of the pages he despised. He has known many a second-hand embrace, a death with a kiss, a fire in one's loins. And yet, Juliet could never live up to his cello.

Juliet could never offer this one true serenity. No Juliet could spare his desolate soul with a whisper, detract his wretched mind from the carmine-hot acidity of Crime and Punishment constantly drowning him. No Juliet could abstract him of this filthy world, of his own filthy essence.

His breaths have long since fallen in sync with the strings, the very first moment he heard them played by another, years and years ago. For the first time in this hollow child's life, he felt the hums and cries of strings somewhere deep and foreign to him, somewhere that isn't hyper-technical and cognitive—somewhere real, human.

What is now a lover, was then the first (and still, the only) entity to reach inside his hopeless being, tracking wood splinters across his arteries, and claw out what one knows as empathy. The kinship towards the instrument only swelled deeper and darker once he had his own, once he was older.

Late dawns and early sunsets have never felt so blissful—heavenly, as when he spent them in the company of another; the bow in his hand their chain, consummating a pact made with blood and song. This was a lover he could touch. This was pure, raw passion.

Fyodor's lover is made uniquely for him. He revels in the knowledge that few have touched it, just like him. They are so alike in so many ways, he had thought as a mere child watching the instrument in adoration, and now this one is his, and he belongs to it just the same.

He belongs to it even when the song is over and the strings hush each other down in respect to him, so that the cello would be the one to listen to Fyodor in return.

His languid breaths are ecstatic! A good performance has always left him like that, and oh, how he adores it. How poetic of him to give his breaths to his lover. How so very sweet of his lover to leave him gasping for air, to be his anchor to humanity.

And he is anchored harder to said humanity with a familiar hot ache and its intoxicating discomfort.

Back arched, he pulls the instrument so intimately close to him that he flushes red from the proximity. Between his legs still, he tilts and positions it so that he's supporting the back of the cello's body with his right thigh, while its side is pressed sickeningly right. He doesn't hold back the low groan hoarsing out of his throat upon the first contact.