#an: but most of all you're both toxic in this relo ish

[lysmune]

marble figures

      your eyes spill red, his hands carve your disaster.

(Nanami Kento/F!Reader) 

Inspired by the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, which stemmed from the copious amount of times I’ve seen Nanami described as a statue of some sort, prompted by adelek’s ave maria. and flintstrike’s erosion (both of which are gorgeously written fics. Please check them out).

     Nanami Kento was a statue of a man, that much you understood, weathered down by the autumn rain and the burden of existence. Erect, upright, upstanding, a model masterpiece whose shoulders sagged ever just in Tokyo’s watercolour nights.

     He’d allowed you to taste the cool of his lips then. He reclined in the chair and shuttered his eyes as you kissed yourself against him.

     If he breathed, you didn’t notice.

     Tucked between the blurring haze of the city skyline, the blue light of computer screens and whirring of overworked fans, you typed in distant silence with him and swallowed the event into bygone. He never spoke of it either.

     Not until summer, at least.

     Drenched in syrupy heat and the cliché of romance, you held your gaze for a minute too long in the still waters. Lips wet, he let you kiss him again and this time, Galatea cupped your cheek and returned your thoughtless affection, borne of warmth and heat for the first time since your meeting.

     And you, Pygmalion, marvelled at the way marble yielded to life.

     In the quiet spaces, the dark, early hours of a morning where the only ones that dared so peek at your twining bodies were the gods, Nanami bared to you his heart. It thrummed and pulsed, and weighed heavy in the palm of your hand as he confessed to the endless thoughts he had of you.

     Hypnos rarely ever graced him, but you did.

     “Why?” you asked as he brought your knuckles to his lips.

     He seemed to ponder the question, then, “You compelled me.”

     Sincere, earnest, an accusatory hush that you chose to ignore as he held your body deft and prayed your name, head between your thighs in worship to his creator. Slowly, you studied the lines of his form: the noble slope of his nose, the sharp gauntness of his cheekbones, the angular dignity of his jaw, the flex and ripple of his muscles every time he moved closer, gold spun hair brushing ivory skin as he looked at you through glassy aqua irises, stern and gentle.

     I could never take credit, you thought as he called you his god; you could never have made a man so beautiful.

     Yet Galatea had only ever known Pygmalion.

     And he had only ever known you.

     And it was always so violently quiet, whatever it was you had with each other. Clipped replies, the unanswered phone calls, questions that he’s never asked; your doubts grew large and plaguing by the day. Despite the intimacy of each embrace, everything else contradicted, revolted, a growing fissure you couldn’t quite mend.

     A lacuna.

     This is just who he is, you convinced, dripped in the honey of his words as he coaxed you to his making, as your eyes wept roses when he touched you holy, made you sigh his name the way revellers would at the feet of god. He made sure you knew what a sight you were, a marvel of Aphrodite’s kindness when she blessed you awake, the only one who’d ever afflicted him with pining, with yearning.

     “No one else,” he affirmed as you sobbed his name.

      No one else, you repeated in delight when he cuffed a golden chain around your wrist, subtly proclaiming that you were his to all those he worked with across the office’s three floors.

     No one else, you reminded yourself when he forgot the plans you’d made with him, the rush of work and urban havoc gnawing him alive. Dinners at upscale bars were his preferred method of apology, next to the glass bottles of Keiko Mecheri and small lily of the valley bouquets. He never said his sorry’s, never wrote them down either, even though those would’ve meant more than petty treasures.

      No one else, you clung to those words still, when he began to dye you in his colours, mazarine blue and wheaten yellow. He painted the winding patterns of his childhood into you, your arching back his fine-bone china, the fire of his palms your kiln. Nanami was a sometsuke ceramicist, and you were his greatest creation.

     Behind the mirror reflection of a brightly lit bathroom, you found the perfection of yourself confounding. Warped, twisted, unsightly, a repulsive mess of parts you couldn’t comprehend.

     Galatea was unsettlingly beautiful.

     Nanami stripped you bare that night and made love to your body. You, however, watched from the carcasses of your milky whites, watched as you moved to the rhythm of him. Your arms wrapped around his neck while your voice sang his name, flushed into his flesh as lines blurred. You never knew how honey-sweet you sounded, how perfectly small you were in his massive, calloused hands, like you were made just for him.

     You felt unrecognisable.

     And Pygmalion was hopelessly, unwaveringly infatuated.

     “What do you love about me?” you asked in your nakedness; Nanami twisted onto his side and looked at you. Fingers came to touch your cheek.

     “Everything,” he simply replied, a nauseating calm of a smile gracing his features.

     Betrayal coiled around the spaces between your ribs. It felt like an excuse, a cheap-shot answer that rang hollow through the marrow of your bones, a refusal to elaborate because he could not, even if he tried. He didn’t know you, and neither did you.

     Whoever you were prior to him, you could no longer reconcile with.

     So you curled against him as he caged you in a lavish lovelessness, the glossed lacquered surface of his empty words weaving you together into someone new. Desperate, you reached for the image in his mind, a tapestry of faces that shifted every time he chipped you away.

     Tsutsuji, he called when he cupped the curve of your figure. Tsubaki, he called when you looked up at him through your lashes. Suzuran, he called when he smelled the perfume he gifted you on your pulse. Sumire, he called when you reddened at his touches.

     You were all of them and none of them all at once.

     In the sunlight of a nine-to-five morning, the bracelet around your wrist glittered, beautiful and dangerous. It felt heavy. Your eyes had easily found his, the softest, emptiest shade of forget-me-not petals. You smiled. Something cracked at the shell of your ear.

      Who are you?

     You stopped right before the door. Winter slipped from underneath as puddles formed. Even in the stillness, you could not find yourself, so you answered your question with the one thing you knew:

      Nanami.

     And then you were in his arms again, wholly and utterly engulfed, your existence brought to life only through his divinity.

     Galatea was nothing without Pygmalion.

     And you were nothing without Nanami.