An Imperfect Circle
Chapter 8
He was sorry for it; his catering lips apologized across Jin's lower tier, chin and jaw. Hwoarang wanted to help himself -- he wanted to shield Jin from the base in his soul because when if it were stripped down through viscera and bone little recognizable would remain. What twenty years warped was hard for a year's oasis to quench, and now the task was set on opposite end to be begun again. Hwoarang wished the ugliness could disappear as fast when he was alone. He hated his mind when Jin wasn't there to reassure it.
When he pulled back from the reparations it was a necessary trauma for them both: dual, sienna almond slits watched Jin with an empathy as the Korean set about opening his flesh to the air, and the eyes. A dark shirt was peeled over his spiky head; jeans rolled down and stepped from until he stood before Jin in a nascent form, his arms patient for acceptance at his sides.
As Jin witnessed the fabric fall away, Hwoarang's body revealing itself to him one portion at a time, lust tempered the intensity of his gaze. It seemed almost a physical difficulty when Jin pulled his eyes a way, angling himself to the side to find the bed. He backtracked to it and sat on its edge, bouncing momentarily on the flimsy mattress and weakening the severe creases and folds that the maid's expert hands had placed into the comforter earlier in the day. He canted his face -- calm, open, almost reposeful -- towards the higher man's and extended his hands in a gentle, beckoning reach.
The reach was a warmth Hwoarang migrated to with the seasonal obligation of a hawk, and he let himself down astride Jin's lap, clothing his nakedness in Jin's arms and Jin's vestments and sending his own arms around the Japanese so tightly and quickly that he might have imagined his own body as another article to be worn.
" ... love you," he whispered into the neck he kissed. "No matter what happens, you're mine, Jin."
Garments were things that could be pulled away, separated; Hwoarang was a tattoo on Jin's body, a fiery hue nestled below the surface of flesh that bore its mark with all of the pride that the predecessor of Hwoarang's mark would never, ever receive. Jin's arms were starved for the sun even in scalding Australia, something that his small hordes of pretty young would-be beaux occasionally pointed out. Wasn't he hot in long sleeves? Why didn't he wear t-shirts...? They wanted to touch the bare flesh of arms whose strength they had all heard about by some means, most often each other. And Jin would always smile complacently and offer a vague excuse, drifting out of their reach.
Jin grew tense under the touch of anyone but Hwoarang, who had the distinct opposite effect. The mere contact of his body with Hwoarang's could melt the tension from Jin's muscles and soothe away the frustrations looming in the recesses of his troubled soul like a balm that no wealth could afford.
Accepting Hwoarang into his embrace, his breath tumbled dotingly down the hard planes of his shoulder and chest, and he closed his eyes as he was kissed.
"Love you too," his lips shaped against Hwoarang's collarbone. "We're each other's forever." His hands grazed down the redhead's sides and then smoothed over the tops of his thighs towards his knees.
Those words seemed to strike a physical ambivalence in the Korean, and he shoved Jin by the shoulders down on his back with a coarse force that might have been alarming where he not spontaneously over the Japanese, staring into his face with nothing vaguely resembling question, or challenge. He lowered his mouth a gasp away, kissing Jin once as he ordered, " .. turn onto your stomach."
He could move Jin himself, but there was something edifying to his libido in having Jin's complicit accordance with his desires, and Hwoarang complicated the task by pressing his hard, warm body against the one beneath him. He had already unbuttoned and unzipped the most unsavory layer between them, and his hand rested against Jin's bare abdomen.
Jin was contemplating the proper reaction when that press of Hwoarang's body against his expelled from him a throaty grunt that he made no attempts to stifle. He gazed intensely into Hwoarang's eyes, his own moving from one to the other, and then he cracked a faint smile.
"You're cute when you say that," he complimented with an intimate quiet. Jin wanted Hwoarang badly -- the hardness aching against his nude hips below the shroud of coarse denim was a clear indication -- and Hwoarang's newfound firmness was alluring, but that wouldn't mean he'd make it easy on him.
Having his first attempt at agency contested -- the one time before that he had the upper hand he'd requested, not commanded, so it didn't count -- made Hwoarang's competitive streak rear its tempestuous head. He grasped Jin's wrists in both his hands and brought them together over the Japanese's head, pushing both almost painfully into the pillow until he could secure both in one hand. By now, he'd brought his mouth over Jin's, and breathed words rather than assaulted with tongue.
" .. do you want to see how cute I can get, Jin?" His free hand ignored what he knew was painful to his purest love and greatest rival, shifting instead to his jaw and stroking it with the thumb.
Jin could recognize this new thrill for what it was, and he would have felt either shame or fear for it if he decided to let either creep into his mind. Hwoarang's forcefulness incited tongues of anger to lick at Jin's soul, but they were mild things that he knew he could control, and he channeled their strength equally into the routes of Passion and Energy. This was just a game, and it was with the person he loved most. His gaze was half-lidded to ease its sharpness and a wide smile crept over his face in a languid dawn. He shifted his wrists slightly, both to test Hwoarang's strength and to reaffirm it.
"Mmm. You promise that you'll show me?" he returned in the same tone, meeting his eyes.
The only thing Hwoarang was certain of was that at this juncture a draw just wouldn't do. If Jin wanted to spar again, no invitation could have been clearer, and Hwoarang's grip on the Japanese's strong wrists tightened like a vice in the wake of that minor struggle, exerting his resolve. It was a game, and Hwoarang longed to play it when he first fought what was then the Mishima Zaibatsu heir.
"I'm not sure you can handle my cute, Kazama." Back to the surnames; the guileful gleam was in the talon's dark red eyes.
"Kazama couldn't, but I bet you I could." Jin-- Kunzo, that is-- had meant it as a jesting half-truth, but only afterwards did he realize his own honesty. It was true that he had come back a different person in name or otherwise, but suddenly he regretted implying it, in that manner and in this situation both. He wanted to put that name to rest, but he was surprised now by the urgency he found in himself to do so. The events earlier in the day were the most likely cause -- but this wasn't the time to be thinking about that. "I love you even if you're cute," he said, veering them back towards the challenge he had posed first.
The slap came fast enough to leave both in doubt of its actuality; upside Jin's profile, a zolt against his jaw. It was a love tap, something the four year old in the dojo might face, but it still had enough power to turn Jin's visage against the pillow. Therein lay the evidence of its occurrence. Hwoarang reestablished his clasp on the Japanese's wrists and cushioned the exposed ear with his mobile lips.
" .. you still look like Kazama to me." And he vowed deep within himself never to let anything change what Jin was to him -- not even Jin himself. It was his selfish vein of fanatic love, perhaps. " .. even if you're gettin' uppity." The Korean, otherwise a domineering force outside the bedroom, didn't expect any lip. " .. are you going to turn over, now, or should I get cuter?"
Jin, who find himself now looking at the room's curtained window, blinked the surprise from his eyes. The sensations somersaulting within him briefly stole his breath. There was that anger, still lurking at a safe distance, and there was that fading surprise, but at the moment he found himself most caught up in the electric tingle that those lips against his ear set coursing down the length of his spine only to surge through him and settle within the core of his lust. Jin didn't want to give in. He didn't want it to end, even though it was truthfully just beginning. Jin began to slowly wriggle under Hwoarang in order to flip onto his stomach ... but it wasn't without passing commentary.
"I'll save you the trouble of pretending."
His pent up and pending desire factored into Hwoarang's recalcitrance to make Jin's sardonic compliance difficult -- he'd asked for it, so he'd have to stomach getting what he wanted no matter how cynically handed to him. The ensuing silence intimated that he didn't do so happily. Pushing the clothing from the Japanese's body took place more roughly than it might otherwise have; Hwoarang drew his nails down the flesh of Jin's hips, thighs and calves with the pants, and when he sought to dispense of Jin's shirt the predictable happened.
Or so he would expect this contentious Jin to foresee it.
The sleeves were bounded around the wrists once Hwoarang pulled both the Japanese's powerful arms to the lower end of his back, and he knotted the constraints with a vigor -- Jin couldn't see his face, only imagination would answer whether it was done cruelly or passionately, perhaps both. After the Korean finished his vengeance, his weight disappeared, and so did his touch. There was only his breathing, and his irretractable presence.
Bare and prone and suddenly untouched Jin shivered faintly even though he felt himself burning with a self-generated heat. He spread his knees and brought them forward slightly to keep himself stable on the bed, his cheek pressed into the unforgiving artificial cloth of the comforter. He tested his bonds, shifting his wrists, the muscles in his arms rippling, that demonic brand on the outside of his left bicep winking like a hard, scrutinizing eye.
That heat was something Jin could define clearly as an angry and passionate want. An English phrase he had heard tossed around on that other continent drifted silently through his ears now-- "playing with fire." Jin realized that he was testing his own self-control; to do so with Hwoarang was the most selfish, but truest, way.
"Giving up?" he grunted.
Those words cut across hesitance that the anchorless, unattached Korean creature contemplated as he examined his handiwork. Hwoarang knew he was losing them both in something novel and strange, almost frightening, and the line lurked as corporeally as the divide of Jin's spine, waiting to be crossed. He'd primed his mouth to ask if this was all right -- if Jin was comfortable, at ease. Those words precluded reassurance for them both. The only response Jin's affront warranted was a firm, detached wet, gliding from the chasm between his protruding shoulder blades, along the concavity of his spine, to the leveling valley at his rear. Touch stopped there, and the moist path over the Japanese's skin became the air's target to chill, make cold.
Jin's eyes snapped close as though Hwoarang's tongue was the switch that powered them, and he turned his face into the pillow in order to muffle his already airy moan. He writhed mildly against the damp attention, and when it was gone he nibbled his limp against the sudden drop in temperature over that streak. He was strangely comforted that he found himself wanting more of this reversed play.
" .. do you want me to give up .. ? I'll untie you." No manner of detection posed any threat of interpreting that tone.
"Don't stop."
Hwoarang hoped that the smooth, amble flesh beneath his mouth could sense the curve there as his lips pressed against it. His hands braced Jin's hips, guiding forces that melded skin and massaged where bone jutted as the perfect swell between them was sucked on with a lazy, greedy indulgence. Hwoarang ferreted out the hotter, more secretive crevice with his face before he commandeered his hands, his fingers weaning Jin apart so he could suck at coral tenderness with the same invested care.
"Ohh, god." With that groan, Jin turned his face into the mattress, his mouth forced open by the air that rushed into and from it. With nothing to hold, his hands found each other and tightened into one eager knot. He wrestled with gravity to lift his sturdy hips enough to press them back encouragingly, but his knee slipped on the slick bedcoat, sending him back down at an angle. This submission deal was tricky business.
And so exacerbated by the subversive support of the dominatrix. Hwoarang shifted his hands only long enough to tug Jin's thighs up so his knees bent into the mattress, making the angle all the more severe and the Korean's target much more accessible. His arms went under and around each of the Japanese's legs so the limpness of ecstasy would proffer no excuse, and retraced the wider path Jin's position offered up comprehensively before he drove into what he wanted: the circle of flesh within Jin which the slick, stiffened muscle sought to pierce in its entirety.
Jin tried to contain the animal growing inside the cage of his chest as he was driven into by heat and dampness, but it continued to swell in size and strength until it escaped him, rushing out of his mouth and directly into the muffling comforter, coupled with now-separated fists that dug into it with similar intensity. He never remembered feeling anything so alive and penetrating, and those ministrations were bewildering and oblivious, dashing to vague, uninteresting pieces all of his previous concerns. He pressed his shoulders down, offering more of that shivering gateway back towards Hwoarang and weakly demanding a garbled --
"More."
Where he had released himself with blazing abandon glistened when Hwoarang lifted his mouth; he set his fore and middle fingers against the crevice, tracing its great and discrete length as he considered the imperative. Jin's shirt, fabric shackles wrested from his arms, didn't factor into the Korean's poignant hesitation. It was the very shivering of that glossy, puckered crown which forgave the Japanese his earlier struggles, and which drove Hwoarang to plunder as he willed. Placing the pad of a single digit to that circle, he shelled Jin's back with his body and warmed an earlobe with his hot breath.
" .. tell me how much more." The lathered opening he held under his touch gave little resistance to the inching push of his finger.
The area of that finger was almost exactly equal to that of the hot, reedy sound which its insertion forced out of Jin. He was too dazed by the firmness which his body now gripped and wrung to protest the removal of its pliable predecessor, and regardless, the press of his conqueror's body against his back was an addition that quelled any complaints. Jin turned his head to the side, struggling to see behind him; his expression was composed -- oddly so -- but his cheeks were flushed and his eyes aflame with need. He remoistened his parted lips and said --
"Another."
A jagged grin cut across Hwoarang's mouth, and after he stretched to bruise the Japanese's succinct lips with a hard kiss, he sprinkled and tousled Jin's head of razor edged hair with his fingers, gaining a commanding grip. The kind touch that'd pushed into him receded, replaced by the flared knob of an impending pain. Burning the Japanese's neck his love, concern, and ruthless lust, the Korean's hot breath also carried words as hard as the hurt he urged through a tight, inhospitable muscle.
" .. is .. this what you want, Jin .. ?"
That slickened entrance, the cause of all Jin's bends and squirms, seemed with the newest and most urgent offering to paralyzing him, his spine reemerging from its previously jellied state and straightening. Jin's eyes were closed, making it impossible to tell if this sudden tensing was an instinctual or deliberate reaction -- one raised either to fight or prepare him for the oncoming shock. His airy breaths hardened into one low, extended hiss, and Hwoarang would be able to feel the form against his own, its pulse still racing, soften into acceptance one cluster of muscles at a time. He bowed his head again, mouthing his affirmation before finally uttering it.
Cresting on primordial desire -- a welling that abrogated considerations of his near non-extant experience in this arena -- Hwoarang used his hand to force himself into a clutching heat that seemed to squeeze all the air from his lungs, leaving them slack to be filled with an inevitable onslaught of moans; a euphonic gasp premeditated as much. Reacting to their wielder's brash intent, arms wound themselves tightly around Jin's chest and torso as Hwoarang lanced himself forward, clutching at the Japanese's muscled breast plate, pulling him upward and backward and harder against the impaler.
Jin was vaguely aware that the maids would be knocking soon and that they would need to check out, but such concrete data meant little while he felt Hwoarang's humid breath feather over the side of his face. He was already half-dressed, but the process was stalled as after a mere minute or so of preparation he would gravitate without fail to Hwoarang or the bed or both. Drawing a breath, Jin sat up, sleek, untamed hair half-veiling the dark eyes that gazed upon Hwoarang.
"Where are you staying now," he questioned with a lazy but truthful curiosity.
The transparent skeins of reluctance had entrapped the Korean throughout the late morning, wrapping and covering him so thick and securely and leaving no room for other clothing, only the wrinkled sheets he brought up against his torso once Jin's absence left a draft in the bed. Hwoarang was having a hard time realizing they had to part, and each time the Japanese came near him he promoted his obduracy with a grasp of hand or kiss against the jaw. The immediacy of the question brought his bare feet to the cold floor, and with the blanket toga'd across his thighs, he steadied his elbows on his knees and took his face in his palms. Invulnerable to gravity, the thick spikes of burgundy capped a saturnine face.
"With Keiji. The guy I was talking to .. the other night." He stared hatefully at the shoes he would have to put on soon. " .. are you with that chick?"
Jin watched Hwoarang with a satisfied grin, his eyes narrowing gently before relaxing again. There was something about watching the Korean move in nothing but a thin sheet.... The former Kazama drifted to the desk, scratching his bare side with one hand while the other searched out the pen and memo pad emblazoned with the hotel's logo.
"She's my sensei; Stacy Jackson," he answered as he scribbled on the top sheet to get the ink flowing and then proceeded to jot down his address and number, first in English and then in Japanese. He didn't even think to reassure that nothing had happened between them, so doubtless was the notion in his own mind. Jin carried the pad and pen over to the bed, offering them to the redhead with a kiss atop those spikes.
The pen and paper were gifts far inferior to their wielder, and Jin must have known that, so Hwoarang rejected the weight of the blame for slowing this process more with his arms. He slid them around the narrow breadth of the Japanese's waist, locking Jin tight in parted thighs, and buried his face in the mantle of chest afore him. Petulant, muffled words followed the knead of his palms up Jin's spine.
" .. she's kinda young to be a sensei, isn't she .. ?" Realizing his insecurities weren't as important as his desire, he brought his mouth up for a bit of air and clarity, his gaze an upward angle. " .. does she know about your family?"
"Yeah, she is," Jin breathed in reply easily enough. He settled against Hwoarang-- his perfect mold -- with one grip supporting some of his weight on the mattress and the other combing through the Korean's hair. Its change was still a tangible surprise, as well as its color. He realized vacantly that Hwoarang was no longer even much of a redhead. "She knows about everything." Meeting Hwoarang's gaze, he canted his head in a halfhearted shrug. "That's why she distracted your friend for us. I hope he didn't try to pull anything, for his own sake."
Hwoarang's lips found a place in the fabric stretched over Jin's sternum to groan to, "I guarantee he did."
Long before he went to the pen, Keiji had been teaching the Korean all about the female sex, mostly because Japanese women weren't as easy as Korean women and of course that alone was a premise for half the fights between them.
" .. but I guess they both can take care of themselves. I just wanna take care of you, Jin." It was a whisper draining off his lips. When he stood up and nuzzled the Japanese's collarbone, his arms shifted to claim shoulders. " .. even if so much's changed." It was the unrecognizable speck of ice in Jin's gaze, the alias, that compelled those last murmured words.
The very fabric of things had been rewoven, but even though hearing his former name spoken filled Kunzo with a subdued resentment at his past, he was hesitant to share this truth with Hwoarang just yet. Seung Joon, Hwoarang; Mishima Jin, Kazama Jin, Miyama Kunzo. Rare were the people who could retrace epochs of their lives so distinctly. Draping his heavy arms around the Korean's neck, Jin bowed his face until their foreheads met.
"The important stuff's the same," he said gently. There might have been more to say, but someone rapped on the door. Jin's eye twitched and he replied in Australian English, loud and firm enough to dissuade the woman from bothering them again for a short while longer.
There were so many irruptions in the history of the Korean and Japanese, loci of of disturbances that attempted to saw through the chord of diamond holding them together. Despite that ineluctable bond, Hwoarang remained sensitive to the envious assaults made upon it. His immediate reaction was to protect it with discretion, but that meant more betrayals to himself than he was willing weather. He knew what he wanted, but the knock forced him to betray himself.
"We'd better get out of here." Placing his mouth against the one Jin turned back to him in brief affection, Hwoarang asked as he stepped away from the bed and sheets, rubbing his chest with a hand.
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