Eloquence

breath

hi im back

Avdol's warm hands clasp around Kakyoin's arms in a gesture too tight and urgent to be comforting. It hurts, a little, hands like fire pressing into the yet-unhealed scratches and squeezing nearly hard enough to bruise. Through his own fluttering red petals Kakyoin can see brilliant pink blossom across Avdol's hands, thorns winding, flowers dancing towards the place where their skin touches like it's sunlight.

Kakyoin has battled his – inner demons, maybe, maybe just a side of himself that likes to make things bleed – his darkness, before, has always been the one to clamp down on the most vicious instincts of Hierophant Green, and he knows – he's learned by trial and by irreparable error – how to unleash just the right amount of fury that he can still pick up the pieces afterward. It's easier, isn't it, with men like these for company, men who can withstand a little of Kakyoin's fighting spirit without shattering like porcelain. And among softer people, or those he could never bear to strike, he's learned how to twist it inwards and divert his violence into other passions, how to condense it down into a smoothly aggressive brushstroke over canvas and turn it into something prettier than black eyes and broken noses. He is a man, not a weapon.

Or that's what he chooses. He thinks he's grown in this year. He's no longer a bloodthirsty teenager whose soul can be moved by DIO's promises of power and savagery.

But Kakyoin is – he's mad. He's frustrated. He wants to cry tears of fury and pound his fists against something that will make his knuckles split open and let out a little of this too much too much too much.

He leans into the stinging hold of Avdol's hands. Fury-blind, suffocating in roses, Kakyoin reminds himself the way his mother used to (his mother, his mother, his mother he abandoned to fight as DIO's soldier) – reminds himself to breathe. And he presses relaxation by force into his muscles, and he commands Hierophant to withdraw and unwind and return to a wary coil ever-present in the back of Kakyoin's mind.

People are yelling. There's chaos in the shadowy background. But all Kakyoin can see is a curtain of red roses, and Avdol's eyes aflame with challenge. Hierophant surges to the surface again. Roses tangle like a choking vine. Distantly, Kakyoin knows that he is panting with effort, that sweat is rolling down his neck, that his heart is racing with adrenaline.

"You're hurting her," Advol states quietly, in his rich fortune-telling voice that reaches Kakyoin's soul before his ears hear the words. But Kakyoin's skin still thrums aggression, and he doesn't know or care who "she" might be. He fights the restraint on his arms. He fights the roses. "You're hurting Holly."

Kakyoin is a bloodthirsty monster who sold himself to DIO. He is incapable of submission. He would be blind again before he would bend to another man's will. He can tear through these roses and through everything in this house. Turn the walls to rubble, reduce the table that held bowls of cherries to mere sawdust, bring everything down on his head and stand alone in the wreckage under nothing but the sky. Victorious.

"You're hurting Holly," Avdol says again, still calm, still in a voice like singing. His eyes are dark with fire. He is soft and serious and Kakyoin can recall a woman who is kind like a mother and whose life he would give up his eyes to protect. Kakyoin is a man, not a weapon. He makes art and he loves the people in this house. 

And it's Hierophant who rises dangerous and deadly to spear itself into the ribcage anyone that threatens Miss Holly, and destroy that person from the inside out. Hierophant and roses wind tight pressure up around Kakyoin's body. Restraint on his arms, weight across his throat. All he can do is choke out a sob.

Against every instinct in him, he bows his head. Anger goes cold in his chest. He is breathing slowly in the collar of roses and Hierophant, shaking, sweat-soaked.

Into Avdol's warm chest, Kakyoin weeps like a grieving man.