An Imperfect Circle
Chapter 4
The sky beyond the paper-thin screens that draped the sole, large window in the hotel room personified the lack of consideration of a wanton, reunited night for anyone outside of that night -- the night that occurred in that gently breathing room. It was graying, tumescent with the guilt it wished the room to feel, and when the sky saw no recourse in a simple, moistened and gloomy swelling, it began to lash at the edifice containing the room with a vicious fury, spraying the walls and splattering the windows with ire for those excluded. If only it could force that concern and that accountability through the brick and wood and glass, drench those inside with it, something universal and something natural, like death, would be sated.
Just as the bawling sky braced itself for triumph -- for one of the accused was stirring, blinking a heavy and satisfied sleep from his sienna eyes -- it screamed suddenly, because the one awakened ignored the blame. It cut the sky with flashes of hot white, and crackled the firmament with growls, when Hwoarang carefully placed his hands on either side of Jin's shoulders -- careful not to wake him -- and smiled warmly. It gathered its strength for another booming siege when the Korean's cool, soft lips brushed themselves over the Japanese's, and then with more pressure breathed in his sleeping breath.
Jin's wild brows furrowed with drowsing confusion until part of him was awake enough to realize the source of that attention without his needing to open his eyes. Then, Jin only smiled. It was a lazy, content smile, and cocky because the most important things in the world had been righted the previous night. He mumble-hummed something that could have been "I'm awake" or "Good morning," take your pick, and yet to open his eyes, detangled an arm from the sheets and lifted it, searching for flesh. It sound it, and curled around it and pulled it down to his own. He opened his eyes in the midst of a small shower of deliberate and delicate good-morning kisses pressed to the side of Hwoarang's face, due in part to the boom of another heavenly roar. Jin's head settled back against the pillow and he sighed, blowing soft, spidery fingers of hair out of his eyes (his bangs now reached the tip of his nose).
"Good morning." He grinned again, because he'd almost added a Japanese equivalent for 'mate.'
"Good morning," Hwoarang breathed back smoothly. A vivid awe and incredulity capped his gaze, adding a strange and unusual intensity that might have easily been mistaken for reverence. Drawing his palm along the side of Jin's ribs and kneading the tendoned dunes with his fingers, he dove towards the Japanese's mouth for another kiss, one that was conscious and harder. When his digits sought their way over Jin's concave hip and paused to rest against the lowest point of his belly, the Korean had already covered the breadth of chest under him with his lips, and was kissing with the same doting, passionate intensity each ridge of abdomen placed along his ultimate path. Rasped words flooded from his throat, varied in intonations, but cohesive in the basic truth: "I love you, Jin."
Smooth muscle ebbed and flowed under Hwoarang's fingers, which was only logical since he was the moon controlling all of Jin's tides. He flexed his stomach so that Hwoarang would have a firm and steady ground for his administrations, which Jin's body sought as eagerly as ever. Jin ran half of his fingers through Hwoarang's hair, exploring the new textures that the different lengths of the locks offered to his touch.
"I love you, Joon," he said, his voice thick and easy. The shrill wind and the beating of the rain was fighting ruthlessly to distract him and it was quite close to succeeding. It was a lesson that Jin had learned at a very young age: storms never happened without a reason.
Still, Hwoarang seemed to be in its eye, close to the whipping edges that only served to foment his hunger. When he arrived at his goal, he, unannounced, buried his face fully in the heat of Jin's crotch, burrowing, and then sliding the even planes of his countenance over springy, hardening firmness, his chin and lips over softer, swollen spheres. Bringing both his arms down to wrap around the Japanese's massive thighs, Hwoarang sparked the clash that lit up the sky and the room suddenly with only his tongue, driving it with a curious force along the tender bridge set lower between Jin's legs. He might have spent an hour sucking at the skin in compensation of its neglect, imbuing it with the same importance every other inch of Jin's flesh warranted.
Hwoarang had gotten Jin to instant and rigid attention, but he was inwardly torn, distraught by the virulence of the storm. Even as his breath quickened in anticipation his eyes were stealing glances of the covered window, and even as he was opening those columns of muscle, angling them up and to the sides to give Hwoarang ample space, the clammer of the rain was as concrete as a penny in his mind otherwise lulled by and hazed with the smoke of lust. Finally he made his decision -- he closed his eyes and slightly tightened his grip in Hwoarang's hair.
He rose up and came down on Jin with the enveloping wet of summer rain; the heat of his mouth was something Hwoarang focused on as he spun his tongue around the fleshy head his lips encapsulated, heat antithetical to the cold of the storm raging outside. He held each thigh tighter with reassurance, his eyes opening sleepily every moment to stare at the Japanese. Prurient, appeased notes came from his mouth each time he fell to lathering the sentient underside of the thick stalk, or sought to take it too the root. He fed from Jin with a vigor unrelenting.
And Jin voiced his pleasure with a new volume, short hollers spiced with loud breaths and breezy moans, his body tensing and easing as though it were a giant trap, and Hwoarang was doting upon the trip wire. He kept his grip in Hwoarang's hair, and with the other hand he rubbed, smoothed and kneaded his own body, nacreous teeth nibbling on his full lower lip. A glutton for attention, the considerable organ itself squirmed joyfully, feeding Hwoarang with a thin and salty promise of future rewards.
The Korean suckled it over his tongue and down his throat with a voracity that made the fluid seem more his to possess, than Jin's to give. The taste drove him to a fiercer contestation with the tempest, until the rise and fall and intermittent twists of his head became one visible action without temporal or directional distinctions. Tucked between Jin and erect himself, Hwoarang focused more narrowly on delivering a culmination to Jin before he indulged his own need, which the sounds coming from the Japanese's lips paradoxically sated and intensified.
"Joon--!" he hissed airily, licking his lips. It seemed with every pace closer to the impending climax that he was pushed, his body arched a little further off of the bed, until he was almost sitting straight, his knees spread and both hands threaded through Hwoarang's lush hair. His breath caught as he thundered into release, hips jerking forward sharply before he was frozen in the baited, oblivious and far too brief eternity of a thick, throbbing, salty-sweet rush. Even before it was finished his body was slumping, muscle by muscle, and he plopped backwards onto the bed with a grinning moan.
Hwoarang recovered from his own shudder, quiet and understated, quickly enough to clean up what he failed to drink. When Jin was heaving calmly beneath him, he slid himself up only enough to rest his face on the Japanese's heaving belly, and kiss it. He turned to glimpse outside, where the clouds were like feathered cotton balls, and murmured after a moment in a voice that was pleased, felt responsible, " .. it stopped raining."
"You're right," Jin realized as he caught his breath, strumming his fingers tenderly down Hwoarang's neck and over his shoulder. He propped his head on a bicep, shutting his eyes long enough to draw one full, even breath through his nose and exhale it through his lips. "You're really amazing," he murmured.
He closed his eyes, content in the mutuality of sentiments. And then, after a beat, he asked clearly and neutrally, "Can you tell me now, what happened?" Hwoarang's hands each skimmed over Jin's forearms and wrists, plying them with encouragement.
Jin's bliss was still too tangible for him to catch the suddenness of the topic switch, but it probably wouldn't have mattered either way.
"Do you want the long version or the longer version..?" Strong fingers massaged the back of Hwoarang's neck.
"Tell me the one I can understand," he replied, soon lifting himself up so he could sit astride Jin and peer in his face. Beneath a motley assemblage of berry-red tiers, his love-filled needful curious devoted eyes were large with willingness. Legs bent on either side of the Japanese, he placed his hands on Jin's chest.
Jin covered those hands with his owns, running them back and forth over the warm fingers and palms. Beneath Hwoarang's touch was a steady, strong, reassuring pulse.
"The last thing I remember here was waking up in the dojo and Takeda-san telling me you'd been abducted ... and then there's a haze. Someone found me in the middle of the desert in the heart of Australia, and the took me to the hospital of the nearest town, which was Alice Springs. I was almost dead. My entire back and my arms were covered in second-degree burns in the sun, and I had long open wounds down my shoulders from the... wings. They simply decided not to heal that time," he supposed simply. "I was there for several days, until Takeda-san tracked me there. Mishima Heihachi ordered me dead."
Jin watched the ceiling distantly, but coolly, as he replayed the horrors of those first several days in his mind.
"I fled from the hospital the night he came there to find me and I was taken in by Stacy... she's the woman with me last night. And the next day, Takeda-san came there to find me. But he came secretly, in order to help me; he wanted me to train so I could come here and replace my grandfather, which I plan to do. It also turns out that he and Stacy knew each other from years before...
After an ambiguous descent, Hwoarang's face hovered a few scarce inches above Jin. They had absorbed his words with a visible and concerned vicariousness, and the mildest stage of comprehension, but those that studied him now were clouded.
"I would have come to you," he said, strong notes trailing successively into ringing whispers. "If only I knew ... I knew you were still alive because ... the only reason I knew, that I could believe sitting there with Bryan Fury that you didn't come, is that you were dead. It was wrong, and selfish, and I hate myself for thinking that." The fortitude to keep his eyes steady broke down at the terminus of the confession, and Hwoarang's face dropped, curtained with spikes.
"I'm glad he's dead. I'm glad for him; that it wasn't me who got to him first..." Jin rubbed Hwoarang's biceps with his fingers before squeezing them gently. "I would have found my way back, but they hadn't even found me by the time it was all over. I was torn apart, but I could have come back somehow. I would've swum." The last handful of words trailed off, a new thought hedging into their place. "You ... Did you get my message?"
"I never heard anything, Jin," he stated, raising his eyes enough to meet the question in the Japanese's gaze. "Nothing."
Something small and quiet broke within the endless murk of Jin's gaze.
"But T--... Takeda-san; when he came to see me at Stacy's I told him to tell you I loved you." It would have been a fast and simple occurrence, one possible to forget. He waited for Hwoarang to remember it.
"I remember him from when he came to the warehouse," Hwoarang stated; perceiving the seeds of agitation in the Japanese's eyes awakened that inclination within him to support and protect Jin, to aid him in whatever way possible. "But that was the last I ever saw him. Your grandfather never sent him after me to try to get to you."
"He's dead, then." The three words were tiny and faraway; Jin wasn't sure that they were even loud enough to hear, but he also wasn't sure that he could summon the voice to repeat them. He swallowed, trying to dislodge the sudden obstruction in his throat, the very thing by which he knew that he was right, as surely as he knew anything. He stared at the ceiling beyond Hwoarang, his eyes vacant.
Hwoarang once wore those windows as his eyes before, yet watching Jin see through them frightened him.
"Jin." His chest tightened -- an ingot of anguish -- and he stretched himself over the desolate Japanese, wrapping him in security and tenacity. "Jin," he said again, his mouth tucked in the nook of Jin's neck. He caressed an unresponsive jaw with calming, entreating fingers.
Terror and sadness dared to rear their heads within Jin, but they were charred and flaked away by an anger that burned like the Australian sun. Sometimes steady and mild, and sometimes stoked and raging as it was now, it was a burning need for vengeance in which Jin also found solace. But doing so -- swallowing it down, trapping it inside of himself -- only served to feed the Beast within. Jin had to express his emotions to free their energy, and so he did so now.
"Takeda-san was my guard from the day I arrived in Tokyo, and whenever he said that something would happen, it meant that the thing would happen. If he couldn'tve relayed the message to you himself, he would have gotten someone else to do it, somehow. Maybe they found out he lied about me. ... Maybe he did something else. I don't know. But it doesn't matter. It's Mishima Heihachi's fault." Jin curled his arms around Hwoarang, squeezing him and rubbing his cheek against his hair, unwashed but still perfect to Jin.
Welcoming the silence, Hwoarang nested against Jin's neck in quiescent felicity, retaining hold of those warm, carved shoulders. After another ten minutes or so he would ask Jin if he were hungry, get dressed and go down to the street to buy some fish and miso soup, maybe go to see what became of Keiji and Stacy. But for now, this was the only thing in life he had to do.