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For every hour that it rains, Dice remembers a bit less about himself.
He listens to pattering against the surface of his tent, quiet and unobtrusive. He’s cold, but numb, his limbs rubbery and unfeeling. The cold doesn’t bother him as much as it did the first few days, when he wore all his socks at once save a pair for his shaking hands. It doesn’t bother him like when he fell asleep outside and soaked all his clothes, frigid rain water cutting to the bone.
His hands don’t shake anymore. Now he just watches the rain.
Cloudcover casts him in a green sort of haze, turning his brown skin grey like the color’s dripped from him to collect in pine needle puddles. It fogs his mind, or maybe that’s the painkiller. It must be both, he thinks, but he’s not nearly numb enough.
Prescription bottle. Dice’s fingers pick at the label a little more, picking so it only reads ARISUGAWA and below, his doctor’s name. He swallows a little yellow pill, oval on his tongue, bitter all the way down. Swallow it down with bottled water, collected from the ceaseless rain.
He leans back down on his sleeping bag, and wishes that dying could go a little faster.
The bottle is returned to his coat, deep in his pocket. He can take as many as he wants until he’s done, and then he’ll switch to the second bottle. Other pocket, over his heart. Barbiturates. He’ll swallow them all and they’ll be far more effective painkillers. The permanent kind. He’s immensely grateful to his doctor for understanding that the last thing Dice wants to do is breathe his last in some crushing hospital room, surrounded by grief and disease.
The cold rain, he tries to convince himself, is an improvement.
When the rain fades, he unzips his tent. Numb legs shake to warm up and he shoves them into boots. It’s warmer outside now that the rain’s nearly stopped and he stands to check his water supply.
Hunger’s left him. It’s been diminished for the past two months, and for a week he’s felt nothing at all. That’s when he knew to give up, long after Jakurai gave him bad news he managed to outlive by a few months. His luck gave him a extra months and his luck gave him the sense to know when to stop trying, because he couldn’t feel like himself if he couldn’t feel hungry. Like his soul’s started to peel from his body already.
He wishes it would go faster.
Dice never sees any animals. They’re afraid, or maybe he’s too far deep in the forest for life to follow. Maybe everything that surrounds him is hiding, watching him from trees and holes and wet grass. He’s too loud and the mysterious world shrinks away.
He refills his water bottle from the tarp he set to collect rain. He’s had rain, rain in spades, so he hasn’t gone thirsty.
The forest was horrifyingly quiet when he first came. He later learned to notice the rustling of leaves, the wind in pine, the dew hitting the ground. He learned his own breathing, ragged. Pulse in his ears. The sound of his own jeans or the fabric of his coat. Now the forest is deafening.
He stands. Hands in his pockets, numb. His feet cold. Eyes just blurry enough that he can’t make out the strange shapes beside trees, like rippled water. Like a mirage, but it’s cold and wet and he’s thousands of miles from a desert.
Dice approaches. Pine crunches under his feet, foreign to the forest’s quiet language. The branches of a large tree, leafy and green, left the ground beneath it dry. Nearly dry, save for the pool of dark, sticky blood.
He kneels. One finger to the blood, coming up nearly black on his finger. It looked red on the ground. His fingers smear it between them, clotted and gelatinous. Old blood.
Tracking whatever was injured--or killed here--will be nearly impossible after the rainfall. He won’t even try, he thinks, but the next droplets of blood are untouched by the rain.
Dice frowns. The blood continues in a broken path, strangely solid. He brings a finger to his mouth, but it tastes like nothing, impossible to gauge how old it is. He’s curious.
The blood continues, easy enough to follow. It looks red on the ground and black on Dice’s fingers, bright against the forest floor but like ink on his skin. Further he goes, telling himself he’ll be able to find his way back to the tent even as his vision swims. The trees around him blur with his odd mirage, like he was drowned by the rain and walks underwater.
He follows further, and the air grows warmer. He’s unsure if it’s his imagination, or if the air takes on a tropical feel, the humidity lending itself to warmth rather than sucking it from Dice’s bones. The blood drops grow closer together, like the injured animal slowed its pace.
It’s dying. Dice holds out hope that maybe the blood isn’t old, that he was mistaken. Perhaps he can save something. He feels empathy for the dying, like he might redeem himself by saving another from his fate.
The drops cluster in twos or threes. Dice smears his fingers in the blood, part from curiosity, part because he likes to see it turn black on his skin. When he stands again, he sees what’s been bleeding.
Under a tree lies the body of a deer. Bloated. Distended. The scent hits Dice too late for him to turn away or cover his face. He’s invested in the story of this deer--call it morbid curiosity.
Closer he goes. A doe, death-swollen and smelling strongly of rot. He circles the body to find her head, but sees only more body.
Blood is pooled under her. He finds the wound, large and oval-shaped and ending her neck abruptly. The deer’s been decapitated, and chillingly Dice can’t find another wound. Maybe she collapsed on a second wound because she certainly didn’t walk all this way without her head.
But what if she did?
Tremors take his body and shake him with a faint horror, of the scent of rot, of red and black old blood. Of a missing head. Of Dice alone in the forest with a cruel hunter, taking the head and leaving a whole body to decay, and blood that doesn’t wash away with the rain.
He backs away slowly, abruptly turning on his heel to leave. Abandon the body. Leave it be, because he’s an intruder in the natural cycles of the forest. He’s a foreign object like the tumors inside of him, like the cancer running wild in his organs.
The forest is angry, he thinks, even if that’s merely projection on his part. Perhaps it’s indifferent to him like he wishes he could be indifferent to what consumes him. He’s not sure which is worse.
The blood he followed to the body is black now, black on pine, black on damp soil. Tracking it to his tent is difficult, because ink doesn’t stand out like the crimson did. Dice can’t get nervous or he’ll lose his way and never find the tent again. Keep fists clenched and don’t let go, don’t get distracted, don’t forget your goal.
But it hardly matters, because he always has a way out of the forest as long as he still has his barbiturates. They rattle in their container and he’s reassured.
Ink on the ground. Ink buried in pine and rain-splattered, ink smeared on Dice’s fingers, and ink underneath the beheaded deer. He follows the path back but it’s slow, slow work.
The temperature doesn’t drop like he expects. Warm around the deer, tropical around the deer, but his tent should be cold. He stays warm, peeling the ski hat from his head, hair unwashed and limp. Safe in his pocket.
When he comes across a large tree, he’s sure it’s the one he first saw the blood beneath, and that his tent will be close by. He can sleep the day away and decide later if it’s his last, if he’ll chase down pills with rainwater and fall asleep forever. He’s looking forward to sleeping, but his tent is nowhere to be found.
And underneath the tree lies a dead deer.
One hand goes to Dice’s mouth. He went in a circle. How? The path was clear enough.
He’s sweating now, unzipping his coat halfway. Panic pricks at his skin and he has no choice but to back away and try again.
Second loop. Ink-colored blood is soaking into the ground, and the path disappears in pieces. He struggles to make out drops in the foliage. It fades from his fingertips and he’s sweating, finally giving up to take off his coat and tie it around his waist.
Panic shakes his hands and he struggles to focus. His way out of the forest is within his reach, deep inside an orange plastic bottle, but what if he’s not ready? What if he needed a few more cold nights, a few more games of solitaire with the deck he brought? A few more sips of rainwater and a few more mornings to find himself and make peace with the Dice he’ll leave behind?
He loses the path. He turns on his heel, struggling to find any sign of it, but the entire path’s been sucked into the earth. Absorbed. It leaves him lost and startlingly alone.
Find it again. His breathing is quick and shallow, mouth open. He picks through leaves, kicking them as though it might reveal the path in soil. He’s left wondering if he imagined the blood, a loneliness-driven hallucination in the empty forest. Fear rushes his heart.
One step in any direction. Search again. Another step. One more, pushing past bushes that might be familiar. And a steep hill beyond the bush, leading down into fog, shrub and rock studding the slick ground.
Dice takes another step and realizes his mistake far too late. He slips in wet leaves, desperately reaching for anything to grab only. Numb hands won’t let him hold and he falls.
If he felt whole then he might be able to catch himself. In a dry forest his feet might find purchase against a bush and he might not drop so far. But as it is, he’s sick and his hands are numb and he slips, falls. He finds the bottom of the hill with a sickening thud.
~
Consciousness brushes his hair back, kisses his forehead, but doesn’t wake him. Consciousness leaves him in darkness, indifferent to the stone jutting into his stomach and the blood pooling beneath him in its red glory. Consciousness escapes him and he doesn’t feel like chasing it down and dragging it back, kicking and screaming, just to wake up in his own blood.
Preventable. He should have stayed put.
Hours later, when darkness chills his bones, he finds enough of mind to reach for his pills. He can barely panic when he can’t find them, both bottles gone. They’ve rolled off and buried themselves in the dark. All Dice can do now is drift out, leave his body in the only way he has left.
~
He has the strangest dream, of thousands of red-legged insects taking him. They carry his body like he rides a wave, floating unconscious on their backs. In his dream he’s cold again and he’s tired, leaving blood behind him like the prey he followed.
~
A water droplet hits his forehead. It slicks his hair, cold and damp. Dice’s face scrunches and he wishes he could forget about the slow dripping, because sleep was so blissful before. He feels as though he’s under a sink and can’t return to the void now that he’s woken up and is responsible for the dripping.
He’s cold.
He opens his eyes but nothing comes into focus. He blinks, cold water clinging to his eyelashes. Another drip and water scatters on his face.
It’s night. He lays on an old mattress, smelling of must and mildew. His back hurts but his stomach hurts worse, numbed by painkillers but not nearly enough. He doesn’t remember the last time he took his medications, and they’re not in his pockets.
Dice’s eyes close. Don’t panic. Panic takes him anyway, sinking claws into his skin.
When he opens his eyes again, he finds the world in better focus. The mattress beneath him is bare, formerly white and now grey, splotched with permanent mildew stains. The trees around him form an odd sort of wall, too closely spaced to allow much room for their roots. Dice isn’t an idiot. Unnatural trees.
He sits up, getting half-way upright before pain overtakes him in waves. The world spins on some invisible axis and his stomach ends up in his throat. One hand to his forehead like he can steady the world by bracing himself. He blinks and focuses.
The close-woven trees form a strange room. Dice can’t turn enough to see what lies beyond, if this is a single room or an entire house, crafted of the forest itself. The ground is moss in patches, soft and green, and otherwise the same pine that litters the forest floor. Considerably fresher, which is odd because none of the trees are pine. It was brought in.
He shakes his head, caught up in irrelevancies. Unlike him.
He fears a bit more of himself drips away with the rain. He wasn’t meant to be in pain for so long, he wasn’t meant to live in deprivation and sacrifice. Dice isn’t himself without a noisy world around him, vices and luxuries at his disposal. He finds himself aching and analyzing in a way he tries never to do, because that’s for survival and he never wants to live by surviving again.
The room is lit by a little fire, too far for him to be heated by it. When he can move he’ll move close to it, his body starved for warmth. Flame casts shadows on the walls and lights him in an orange glow.
Across the room is a large wine-colored armchair, the back facing him. A man lounges across it, arms crossed on top of the headrest, chin resting on them. Silently and unmovingly he reads, the book covering most of his face.
Dice stares. Water drops on him again and still he stares. The first person he’s seen in--weeks. The shadow makes it so he can’t really pick out any features, but his hair is light, flatteringly lit in orange. One finger twists in his hair, brown and wavy, wrapped around a slender fair finger.
“Where am I?” Dice asks. His voice is rough. Unused.
“Deep,” the man answers without hesitation, as if he knew Dice was awake and was waiting for him to speak. He doesn’t look up from the book. “Deep in the forest.”
“My stomach hurts.” Laughter bubbles at his lips. Laughter at the absurdity of it all. If he gets to talk to one more person before he dies, he’s grateful, but he’s in so much pain he can hardly see straight.
His fingers probe the wound. He was hoping that falling onto dark forest stone was part of his dream, but it hurts to press. A bandage is tightly wound around his hips, the injury close to his navel. The pain is sudden and shockingly bright. He laughs again, the pain flaring.
“My pills,” Dice breathes. “The bottles. Did you see them?”
Slowly the man looks up. His eyes reflect the fire’s glow and still he holds his book up, obscuring the rest of his expressionless face. He shakes his head, barely perceptible.
“Okay. Okay.” Dice lays back, one hand to his head. Water drops on his fingers. No pills. No way out of the forest. A stranger, ignoring him in favor of a book, but perhaps not an enemy. He bandaged Dice. He might have even stitched the wound, not that it’ll save Dice’s life, because he’ll die either way.
The man is still unmoving.
“Who are you?” Dice asks. “You brought me here?”
“Yumeno Gentaro,” the man says. His words are light and measured. “You would rather me leave you to die?”
Dice snorts. “No, not really. I just need the pills I dropped. They’re--important.”
Gentaro nods, the motion slight.
“I’m Arisugawa Dice,” he says next. “Did you take me far?”
Gentaro nods again.
Dice is frustrated. “How far? I need those or I need to get back to civilization as soon as possible. A phone and a pharmacy.”
“You’re in pain.”
A statement, not a question. His gaze pins Dice to the mattress.
“Yes. Yeah, a fuck ton.”
“I can help you,” Gentaro says. “I can take your pain from you. More, if you want.”
“Yeah?” Dice snorts. “Are you going to kill me? I wouldn’t even mind, you know. I don’t care.”
Gentaro blinks. “Why not?”
He sucks in air, pain making his vision swim. Stomach pain and pain all over, shaking his hands and making it hard to think. He pats the front of his jacket again like he might have missed the bottles the other two times he checked.
“Because I came here to die anyway.” Dice’s eyes close. He gives up on finding his meds and gives up on preserving any sense of privacy. Stranger danger. But what’s danger to one with nothing to lose?
“Why the forest?” Gentaro asks. “Why not--a hospital. Your home. Somewhere you love.”
Dice is angry with himself. “Because I let my luck choose. It picked here.”
An atlas and a pair of dice. He couldn’t decide and he hated the feeling of indecision. A bad plan is better than no plan at all, so Dice resolves to always have a plan.
Gentaro pulls himself up from his chair, still holding his book. It’s rather like a fan, coyly held like he’s preserving some sense of modesty. Or like he’s flirting. If Dice still cared he’d sense danger, because there’s nothing natural about the experience--not the deer’s blood, not the home made of closely-planted trees, and not the strange man.
He steps closer, motions oddly smooth like he glides over the ground. Dice isn’t surprised that the clothing he wears is antiquitated, a dusty yellow-tinged kimono under a hakama that grazes the ground. A haori in the same color as the shadows trees cast. Grandpa clothes, though Gentaro can’t possibly be more than a few years older than Dice.
Alarm bells should be ringing in his head, loud enough for him to drag his bleeding body up and limp out. But he’s been in the slow state of dying for too long to worry, and hey, the strange man is kind of hot.
“Luck has a funny way of catching us with our pants down,” Gentaro says, words ringing with wry humor. “Of catching us with something far better or worse than we dreamed.”
“Yeah?” Dice snorts. “And what’s my luck given me, something better or worse?”
“Both.”
Gentaro waves the book like a fan, then snaps it shut. Dice’s gaze drifts from his eyes--faintly green in the light--and down lower. Down to his nose, thin and sharper than expected. Down to his mouth, smiling faintly, and lower still.
His lower jaw becomes something inhuman. Along either side of his face, past the carved angle of his jawbone, resting beneath his ears. Long, red, sharp-spiked in black.
Gentaro clicks his tongue and the forcipules on either side of his face twitch in unison. Dice remembers his dream of centipedes and remembers the beheaded deer. The alarm bells hit him all at once and make his heart race. Blood drains from his head.
Darkness eats the edges of the stranger, part man and part insect. Dice falls back into the dark. Let it drown him. Let it eat him up. Or let him wake to fight where his luck’s gotten him.
~
His neck is warm. Hot, even. Burning up.
Dice’s breath is shallow. The world spins when his hand goes to his neck, to see if he’s on fire. To see if he rolled into the open flame. To see if his flesh is singing and melting, peeling from bone in flame-blackened sheets.
But his hand feels no pain. Blood clings to his hand, but he’s barely bleeding. Between his collar and shoulder are two 1-yen coin sized holes, four or five inches apart, puncturing his skin but his blood doesn’t flow.
He shakes. His vision blurs and takes his hand with it, so he can’t see how much blood he’s lost. It’s gel where he was punctured. Where he was bitten. His blood is black like ink on his fingers.
Eyes close. He might pass out again. He wants to pass out. It’s all too much for him in the moment--dying, an insect hybrid man. One at a time. He’s already at capacity for weird shit. Each breath lessens the heat, and he feels only warm. Warm, inside and out.
“Are you back with me?”
Dice’s eyes flutter open. Water drips on him from above and he doesn’t bother to react.
Gentaro lies beside him on the mattress. Golden brown hair twists between his fingers, his gaze impassively on Dice. Dice can’t help but to focus on the forcipules, rather like short insect legs but resting on either side of his jaw. The ends are sharp and angled down, black-tipped. As far as he can figure they’re attached to his lower jaw, because they move when Gentaro speaks.
“Did you bite me?” Dice asks. His hand still shakes, hovering above his neck.
His eyes crinkle, a smile that touches only his upper face. “Are you in any pain?”
Strangely, no. He feels feverish and damp, from sweat and the damned dripping water. He should be in pain from dying and getting impaled on stone and from not taking his meds in hours. But he’s not.
Better than pain meds. His eyes close, rolling up into his skull. Like morphine that leaves his mind intact. He’s tired, but he’s ecstatic. The pain is gone and he’s in a numb bliss.
“No,” he says finally. “No, I’m not.”
Gentaro nods. “There. My venom doesn’t usually have analgesic properties, but I suppose you’ve come at the right time.”
Dice is overwhelmed, trying to focus on one piece at a time. “What are you?”
“Where are your manners, Dice? I’ve taken your pain from you and given you refuge in my home. I’ve bandaged your wound. I laid you down in my own bed and you return this kindness with invasive questions.”
“I think it’s fair to ask. You’re not--human.” Dice frowns. “And you bit me.”
Gentaro smiles, his arm draping over Dice’s body. They lie beside each other like friends or lazy lovers, but Dice can’t find any sense of comfort in the damp otherworldly house. It’s all unbearably strange and Gentaro’s skin is far cooler than his own fevered body.
“I want something from you, Dice. Something in exchange for my kindness,” Gentaro says. “It’ll take little effort from you. Then after I can take you to where I found you, or help you find a phone. I can drag you back to civilization and set you like an orphan on anyone’s doorstep.”
He curls against Dice, unmoving in his haze.
“Or,” Gentaro continues, his head nuzzling against Dice’s shoulder. Closer to the bite marks, to the holes in his flesh. “Or, I can kill you. A blissful, painless death.”
Dice snorts. “Would I become your meal? Like the deer?”
Gentaro waves one hand like he’s brushing the topic aside. “It’s of no consequence. Your decision, really.”
The blood, red and black, like Dice’s own on his hands. The deer must have been full of venom. He wonders still if she walked without her head, but he doesn’t know if Gentaro will tell the truth. He doesn’t want to sound stupid.
“What do you want from me?” Dice asks. His body feels slow in its bliss, like he could nap peacefully. Death like this wouldn’t be so bad. It might even beat death in a wet tent, his bloodstream full of barbiturates. He’d get to die beside another--human or insect or something in between, it doesn’t matter.
Gentaro’s hand, thrown across his body, finds Dice’s hand. He takes it in his own, skin cool against Dice’s hot skin. His eyes, half-closed, meet Dice’s.
In a voice smooth like honey and just as sticky, Gentaro speaks, low into Dice’s ear. “I’m trying to seduce you. I want your cock, stone-hand and deep inside me. I want to suck pleasure straight from your bones like marrow. I want to make you come apart and I want to give you the best quarter-hour of your life, if you can last that long. I want you to come inside me.”
Dice chokes. “Excuse me?”
“What, too much?” His voice turns dry, his cheek against Dice’s. “You’d rather not have the anonymous sexual encounter of your life? It’ll be the last one you get, you know.”
“It’s sudden. I don’t even know what you are, or where we are--” Dice’s face is hot, flushed. “I’m injured.”
Gentaro releases Dice’s hand, running his fingers across Dice’s jaw, his neck. Absent-minded and lazily erotic.
“If you don’t want to you can just say so,” he says. “It’s funny, Dice, I didn’t take you for the type of man to second-guess himself.”
Dice blinks. Dying has matured him far too fast and he feels unlike himself. His thoughts are foreign to him. When has he ever been the type to turn down something dangerous and stupid? Who is he, calculating risk?
Because thinking is for survival and Dice is done surviving. He’s been done for years.
Gentaro is right. Dice would love to die how he lived--doing something too fast and without care for consequences.
If he fucks a--bug, monster, demon, dream, human--he’s prepared to accept what happens.
Trust in his luck.
When his pain fades away, so does his newfound maturity. If he wasn’t so tired he’d feel like his old self. Young and foolish and prone to waste. Hedonistic.
It’s Dice who leans up, hands barely managing to avoid forcipules, hands in Gentaro’s hair. Feeling long segmented antennae just behind his hairline, tucked behind his ears, hard-shelled and as thick as his pinky.
His hair is soft. Soft and clean and wavy, spilling over bloodstained fingers and antennae. He meets Dice’s mouth as soon as he considers kissing the man, hungry and with an odd desperation Dice didn’t expect.
Cool lips on his, teeth taking his lower lip between them. Cool saliva on his, strange-tasting if he considers it but he’s too focused on breathing. His hands knot in golden brown hair and sharp chitinous exoskeleton grazes his cheeks. Nearly enough to draw blood but his focus is on anything else.
He’s feverish, sweat collecting at his hairline. Gentaro’s hand, slender fingers, press into the soft underside of his jaw. Prodding and prying. Twisting just for the fun of it. He turns Dice’s head to the side, exhaling cool air with lips against his neck.
“I smelled you from across the forest,” Gentaro breathes. “And I needed you, I had to find you. My form craved yours with a singular visceral focus.”
“Should I be flattered?”
Cool breath against his neck. “You should be honored.”
So honored he is. Dice’s tongue is clumsy against Gentaro’s lips, unable to match Gentaro's urgency. He kisses like he’s hungry for Dice, like he could suck Dice up and consume him. Dice catches the urgency secondhand, the heat in his blood feeling like an aphrodisiac. He catches the heat and hunger like a sickness. All he wants is release.
Gentaro leans back, cool saliva between them in strings like a spider’s web. His fingers reach for the hem of Dice’s shirt, black and stiffened from the forest and rainwater laundry. He peels it from skin and Dice exhales, bare-chested beside the stranger.
“You should be more than honored,” Gentaro whispers. The sharp points of his forcipules drag across Dice’s skin, leaving long scratches. In his state he feels only pleasure, like the nails of a lover drag across his chest.
“Should I?”
Gentaro’s tongue brushes over the venom pricks he left by Dice’s collarbones. Tongue circling the wounds like he could make Dice come from eating out his insect bite.
“You should feel chosen,” Gentaro says. “You should feel reverent. You should feel worshipful, as if God himself picked you to sleep with. Feel rapturous that I choose to give you pleasure, and ready yourself for a blissful death when we’re both finished. Is that how you want to go out?”
Dice sucks in air through his teeth. “Not ideal, but top ten deaths, maybe.”
Water drips against his head. Gentaro’s tongue brushes over venom-filled bites, lapping at gelatinous black blood. Flicking over flesh that won’t scab over.
Gentaro’s slim fingers hook in Dice’s belt loops, pulling down. He’s sharply aware that he hasn’t properly showered in a few weeks--there’s no soap in the woods, only standing completely nude in heavy rain. Here it doesn’t matter, because his body is just a vessel of his soul. Here it doesn’t matter, because Gentaro wants to fuck him if he smells like the forest or like lavender, and it doesn’t matter because his human existence takes a back seat to the ethereal mess he’s sucked into.
His jeans are discarded to the moss floor. Gentaro’s kisses turn messy, and an accidental prick draws blood. Gasping, Dice knots his fingers in Gentaro’s hair, if only to have some semblance of control over where he points his forcipules.
He pushes Gentaro away, breathing heavily. Hands in hair. Catch his breath. The slender antennae buried in golden-brown twitch impatiently.
“I want to see you,” Dice pants. Sweat beads up on his face and he tastes salt. “If fucking you is
the last thing I do, I want it to be good.”
Gentaro breathes normally, as if he’s unfazed by the situation.
“You want to be worshipped? Give me something to worship.”
Gentaro pulls himself up with his arms, undoing the himo clasp on his haori. Dice is transfixed by the motion, as if the present is worth more for the intricacies of its wrapping. He undoes the hakama, heavy bark-colored fabric over his kimono. An obi in rich dark green. By the time he gets to the kimono, Dice can see the lower half of his body.
Dark shirt, close to the skin. Gentaro tugs it off, laid bare beside Dice.
He breathes faster now, ribcage in pale bone under skin. Below his navel, his form loses its human resemblance. Chitinous exoskeleton replaces pink-flushed skin in sheets, large and nearly as hard as bone. Segmented plates, cool to the touch. The edges are uneven. Dice could believe that one day, the insect half of Gentaro ate up his lower body. The uneven edges look like teeth. Slowly moving up and slowly devouring the human. But perhaps he was born this way.
Below human skin is the large body of a centipede, dark-shelled and segmented. Belly-side, the exoskeleton is paler, a pink-brown color. Whiter the closer it gets to Gentaro’s stomach, pale like it never sees the sun. The backside is darkest brown and red brown in stripes, each segment beginning nearly black and fading out to red.
Absently his legs twitch, lighter than his body in yellow-orange. One set of legs per body segment, and Dice counts at least twenty segments. Each leg is articulated in far smaller exoskeleton plates, about twelve or fourteen inches long. They’re thick and Dice is sure Gentaro can support his body weight on them. When he walked toward Dice before he was bitten, he was walking on dozens of little legs. Graceful and steady.
“Can I touch?” Dice asks a bit breathlessly.
Gentaro’s face betrays no inkling of emotion. Dice thinks the twitching of his legs means he’s nervous, that Dice’s approval or disapproval of his body means more to Gentaro than he’s admitting.
The carapace is colder than he expects. Smooth and ridged where the segments end. Dice half-expected he would be able to feel a pulse or the movement of breaths but the body is still. Inhuman, he thinks, but that’s unfair. It’s still Gentaro’s body.
He leans up, body stiff, hands against Gentaro’s cold exoskeleton. He’s never considered the possibility of fucking a bug, but what a way to go out. It tastes much sweeter to him than dying alone in his tent, and he will die either way. He dies in a painless ecstacy.
Dice pushes Gentaro down. “How about I do the seduction? I’d rather not be stabbed again.”
Gentaro offers a hesitant smile. “Forget foreplay. I want you.”
But Dice leans over him anyway, pressing kisses to collarbones. Hand knotted in his hair, antennae flicking against fingertips. He dares not mark up the man beneath him, because how could you bruise what you worship? Kisses only, the brush of his tongue will have to suffice.
He straddles Gentaro’s body, surprised to see the fluidity of his centipede half. It twists in on itself like a spring, untwisting just as quickly. Legs graze Dice’s skin.
“You’re going to have to help me out here,” Dice murmurs, voice low. His free hand hangs above Gentaro’s lower body. “Where do I--”
Gentaro’s fingers meet his. He guides Dice’s hand between chitinous plates, the ridges between. A separation between. Dice wouldn’t have found it without heavy assistance, but his fingers slip into a ridged cavity, tight and deep.
It’s cool inside, slick with a viscous substance. The shape inside is ringed, uneven walls that Dice can scarcely wait to feel on his cock. The cavity stretches deeper than he can reach, hard for him to get two fingers in.
Gentaro doesn’t react to the stimulation, instead pulling Dice’s boxers down. He strokes Dice’s cock with two hands, his fingernails sharp against the head. One hand squeezing Dice’s balls, rough and unexpected.
“Oh, God.” Dice sudders. “That’s so good.”
A smile. Tongue run over teeth. Dice aligns his cock between carapace segments, intent on pushing in slowly, taking his time. An adjustment period.
“Slam your cock in me,” Gentaro moans, hands against Dice’s collarbones. Against his neck. “Give it to me rough and fast. I can take it.”
Dice’s breath is tight in his throat. Cock hard. He’s caught in Gentaro’s urgency, hungry and agonizingly pent-up. He forces himself not to rush.
Slowly he pushes inside, parting exoskeleton plates, pushing into the tight cavity between.
Dice gasps when he feels the ridges, tight on his cock. Surprisingly soft but muscular. Slick with a white-tinted viscous liquid, lubricating his cock.
Gentaro’s arms wrap around his neck, forcipules close to the quick pulse of Dice’s jugular. He leans up to meet Dice’s body, breath against his ear, holding him tight.
Like prey.
“I need you to come in me,” Gentaro whispers. Breathy. “Do this for me and I’ll give you what you want. The deepest wish of your heart.”
Dice pulls half-out, pushes back inside. The cavity’s shape is ecstacy, like a tight alien fleshlight. Like a pulsating, lukewarm toy.
His deepest wish. A painless death, right?
Fuck to die. Dice thinks that’s funny. What a fitting end, isn’t it? Separated from reality like he is, balls-deep in an insectoid monster, losing his life in an ethereal wood. Nothing matters on this plane.
He thrusts. Hips tilting forward to run his shaft against ridges, pleasure swelling. Slamming into Gentaro, just like he wanted. Dice doesn’t get any reaction from the man under him, no sign of pleasure or satisfaction, only urgency.
“Is this good?” he asks, hesitating.
Gentaro pushes him to the side, throwing Dice down against the mattress. He hovers over him, fingers splayed against Dice’s bare chest.
“I want it faster,” Gentaro says. “Faster and harder.”
His body wraps around Dice’s legs. Smooth, cool exoskeleton against his skin. Saffron-yellow legs, twitching against Dice and body squeezing, squeezing him still. Now Gentaro positions himself over Dice’s length, faintly smiling.
Dice groans when Gentaro lowers his body, taking in his length smoothly. Water drops on his forehead. Wrapped around him, Gentaro squeezes Dice’s legs together, crushed under a spring-like coil. Hands to his neck, to his throat.
Gentaro’s eyes flutter closed. Rhythmically he sinks down and Dice lets himself lay back, be still. Be like prey under him. Be like prey.
Pleasure swells up in him. Dice is breathless, angling his hips push in harder, even if Gentaro’s doing all the work. He sucks in air between teeth. It’s so good, so much stimulation, and his whole body shakes.
Feverish. Gentaro slams down, taking in Dice’s full length. No expression on his face, like fucking Dice is a chore. Tighter he squeezes.
Dice is close. He tries to say something--faster or slower or that’s good or God, he feels so much and he thinks he’s going to explode from the pleasure of it all, the stimulation, the pressure. It comes out garbled and Gentaro says nothing at all, focused.
Water drops on him from above. Dice comes, hips shaking, hands trembling. He comes in a flood of indistinct words and in sharp gasps. He comes in a white flash, consuming and all-encompassing, fading in lightning-sharp quivering rushes.
“Good job,” Gentaro murmurs, pulling himself off. Dice is sure he didn’t come, unless he came as silently as he fucked. Still his eyelids flutter and he lays beside Dice, body loosening but not uncoiling.
“Did you get off?” Dice asks, words slurred.
“Not yet,” he answers. “Not yet.”
~
Gentaro is still beside Dice, and Dice lets himself rest too. Naked and damp in the forest, letting himself sleep beside a stranger, man and insect.
Man and insect. Stranger. Demon, dream, nightmare. Ghost of the forest. Wild animal like the rest of the wild animals Dice can’t seem to find when it rains. Tumor of the forest like Dice is, like he’s intimately acquainted with. I’ll be what you want me to be, Gentaro seems to say, whatever you think I am.
“Stay with me a bit longer,” Gentaro murmurs. His eyes stay closed, breathing even. He could be sleeping.
“Okay,” Dice says.
“Will you do me another favor? Before I give you your deepest desire.”
“What do you want?”
Gentaro’s eyes stay closed. His voice is slow and lazy, heavy with sleep. “Your body and your warmth. Not for very long. You can sleep the entire time.”
Sleep. That sounds nice.
“I want your warmth. Your soft, pulsating organs. I want you to keep something of mine safe inside you while you sleep.” Gentaro’s voice is syrupy and low in Dice’s ear. “Growing inside you while I grant your truest wish.”
“Sure.” Dice says, voice weighed down in comfort.
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
Gentaro opens his eyes, fingers tracing Dice’s jaw. Hands soft and cool against Dice’s skin. Slowly he leans up, lips light against Dice’s.
“You do so much for me,” Gentaro whispers. “I’d like to think you’re growing fond of me. A fondness than transcends what I can do for you.”
“I’m--” Dice considers this. “I’m out of time. It doesn’t matter.”
Gentaro leans forward like he’s going to kiss Dice again, but instead his forcipules slice into Dice’s chest. Aligned with the old pricks, but going far deeper.
Dice’s eyes open. Suck in air. Venom snakes through him like slow electricity, frying his veins. Lighting him up. He feels only blistering heat and poison worming through his body, chest aflame. Arms twitch, like his muscles could peel free and escape. Hands shake.
Poison, black like ink. Taking over his blood. Flooding his body. Now he’s marked and he’s like prey, smelling of the predator. Marked for consumption.
When the pain fades he’s still, frozen in place. His body is hot and he sweats. Black venom and blood mix and drip from him until Gentaro’s tongue brushes over the wounds, then they’re still too.
Gentaro exhales sharply. “I’m sorry for the pain. When it fades you’ll find yourself changed.”
Sleep, Dice. Sleep and let the worry fade from the body.
His eyes stay half-open, fixed on Gentaro’s fingers. Steadily he undoes the bandages wrapped around Dice’s stomach, shedding the white fabric like a cocoon. Beneath is bruised skin, blood-darkened skin. Beneath is a cut that hasn’t healed, rough and likely fatal if Dice hadn’t been brought here, between reality and dream. Two or three inches long, jagged and gaping. He could see his organs inside if he leaned up.
Gentaro’s slim fingers brush over the wound. Gentle. Light. Pushing inside, painless. Caressing organs and viscera. Fingering Dice through his stomach.
“It’s nice in here,” he murmurs. “Warm. Blissfully warm. Wet. I can feel your pulse through your insides.”
When he pulls out, his fingers stick with blood and clear fluid.
“I fucked you and took you inside of me. Spermatheca,” Gentaro breathes, viscera-slick fingers going to his own slit between exoskeleton plates. “A strange reverse fertilization. Your human ejectulate pulls the human from me and I hold eggs of insect only. You’ll keep them inside you for the time being, won’t you?”
A strangled sort of laugh escapes Dice’s lips. “What?”
Between pink-brown plates on Gentaro’s underside snakes a odd fleshy member, faintly resembling a dick but dark in color, more elastic. Five or six inches long. Thin. He strokes it, nearly dark purple in the low light.
Stroking harder and quicker, darkening like ink and slick. The organ swells to allow something to pass through it, strange and bulging, and Gentaro’s breath catches.
He holds something up for Dice to see. Yellow like lemon candy. Round, slick. Something in faint milky shadow curls inside. It sits in his palm, rolling between fingers, about the size of a ping pong ball.
“Exciting, isn’t it,” Gentaro says. One hand, blood-slickened, opens Dice’s mouth. Pulling jaw down. The free hand pushes the egg into his mouth, metallic and slick like a bursting boba. It takes nothing of sweetness or fruit, just faintly salty. He can’t break it--he dares not break it. His mouth closes and he keeps the strange insect egg warm on the bed of his tongue. When Gentaro’s long fingers push it deeper he swallows, throat taking in the smooth shape surprisingly easily. He can feel it all the way down, uncomfortably massive in his esophagus.
Gentaro slips his member into Dice’s side, slithering among his organs. Deep inside his viscera.
“I’ve created something beautiful,” Gentaro says. “An experience for you. Young for the forest.”
A lemon-slick egg is pushed into Dice’s viscera, Gentaro’s breath shaky. Like he’s getting off to it, to pushing eggs inside his wound, resting among his organs. If Dice could see inside his own body he’d see them gathering, pushing aside kidneys, yellow and smooth, slick in his fluids. Small. Gathering up and pushing, pressure on his insides, shoving everything aside.
Gentaro’s eyelids flutter and his breath is heavy. Dice’s stomach stays as flat as it was but he can feel the eggs inside him, his body little more than a nest. Pressure inside him. Building, acid hot in his throat. Gentaro’s fingers play at his jaw and he thrusts, tantalizingly slow and methodical. The pressure swells inside Dice with no release.
It’s a long time before Gentaro pulls out, sucking in air through his teeth. Cool breath against Dice’s neck. If that was his orgasm, he came silently. He wraps around Dice and doesn’t let go, head curled into his shoulder, golden hair spilling over bite wounds and collecting warmth against his neck.
They lie like lovers while Gentaro’s spawn grow in Dice.
~
Water drips against Dice’s forehead, and he sleeps.
Consciousness can’t shake him. Can’t stir him. He sleeps in eternity, gorging himself on sleep. It’s in his nature to over-indulge in everything, isn’t it?
Arisugawa Dice could never do anything halfway. He had to go all-or-nothing with living and dying both. He had to live in extremes--starvation or gluttony. Abstinence or indulgence. Denial of any luxuries or hedonism with anything he could get his hands on. He couldn’t even die half-assed.
Dawn comes to the lonely forest and finally wakes Dice. Sun splits trees, flooding in silently, illuminating Dice’s baro body and Gentaro’s dark carapace, wound around Dice like he might protect a nest. And that’s all Dice is at the moment, a nest, a body, a nursery. He tries not to think about it but his stomach hurts and his body is sore, and he swears he feels movement inside him.
Gentaro stirs in his sleep, the sun lighting his hair up gold. Dice fingers a strand, his hands having shaken off the poison-induced paralysis. Antennae hidden in hair, perhaps purposefully. He brushes gold from Gentaro’s face and watches him sleep, a dream within a dream.
Like Gentaro, this place is whatever Dice wants it to be. A dream within the forest. A new plane. A world trapped in the past, away from reality. A world of deceit. He chooses to believe it’s a dream and a dream it becomes, and even the trees take on a sleepy colorful haze like watercolor. Like a dream he loses himself and like a dream he can’t fear consequence.
When his hands move they no longer shake. Dice frowns, flipping his palm over, pink and tan. He’s still.
Inside him he feels movement. A stirring. So fast, unless time passes differently here. His stomach twists and his breath catches, body warm.
One hand to his chest, and the sensation in his esophagus.
One hand to his throat, a strangled sort of gasp breaking the silence.
One hand to his mouth, brown fingers past his lips and past his tongue, deeper and deeper. He feels crawling, writhing deep in his throat. Miniscule legs on the bed of his tongue and he’s viscerally terrified. Sweating.
Between his fingers he feels it and pulls, long and yellow and twisting. Little legs on the roof of his mouth and tip of his tongue and on his lips, crawling across his skin.
Dice holds a centipede in miniature, nearly four inches long but slim, pale yellow like lemonade.
It twists around his finger like Gentaro twists around his legs, its little head still between fingers. Forcipules are impossible to see without squinting, the tiny creature inches from Dice’s face. It squirms in his saliva, writhing to break his hold.
It’s cute. Dice watches it with a removed sort of fascination, unwilling to drop it and break the spell, whatever magic the moment holds. He’s unwilling to question the hatching inside his stomach. He holds something new and unique and something he helped make. Something he carried, alien inside him.
Something constructive and beautiful.
Wordlessly he drops the tiny centipede on Gentaro, small and golden in his hair. It moves slower, struggling ceased like it knows it’s safe. Gentaro sleeps and the insect is still.
Dice’s fingers splay over his stomach, over his open wound. Deep inside him he feels more insects awaken. Ready to burst from their nest.
Body autonomy, consensually taken from him. He chooses to let his body nest monsters in miniature. His body has given way to create something strange and foreign and beautiful, something frightening and lovely. In the act of creation he feels a little more like himself and a little less like his sickness: an act of revolutionary reclamation through dream fucking a bug and carrying his spawn.
Dice could laugh, but he doesn’t want to wake Gentaro.
The movement inside him stirs his stomach, pushing aside organs. His fingers press against the wound, painless. They push inside, fingertips and then the first knuckle, where he brushes against the slender antennae and minute forcipules of more milky yellow centipedes. Pinch and tug out, another in his hand and sticky with his blood.
Tenderly Dice brings it to his lips, letting the creature rest on his tongue. His free hand pushes deeper, his fingers brushing against dozens of insects fighting their way out of him.
The second centipede goes to Gentaro, still sleeping. Passive in his hair, nuzzled against his face. Damp and faintly yellow.
From his stomach they pour freely now, flowing over Dice’s hand in hundreds of legs and hundreds of soft carapace segments. They swirl over his fingers and wrap around him and he pours them over Gentaro, the fruits of his labor.
“Oh,” Gentaro’s soft whisper comes, sleep-heavy.
More come. They leave his wound in all directions, crawling over the bare skin of his stomach, none biting as if they recognize that he’s friendly or not worth the trouble to eat. Gentaro’s hands join Dice’s, letting the flood of young insects crawl over both their palms. Still they crawl in Gentaro’s hair, exploring his dark forcipules, coiling in brown.
“Scolopendra subspinipes,” Gentaro says, his voice light. “Thank you for helping me.”
Milky yellow in his hand. Dice watches them move, silent in early morning glow.
“They’re beautiful,” Dice says. “Really.”
Gentaro smiles. “I think so too.”
The last of the lemon-colored young leave Dice’s body, and he watches them crawl over his hands. The sensation of their legs is punctuated by raindrops, cold and from no discernable source.
Gentaro presses his lips to Dice’s shoulder, still bare. “All dreams end eventually. You don’t seem like someone to mourn what’s ended, though. You seem like someone who lives each moment to the fullest.”
Cold rain on his hands. Dice can feel pine under him, stone at his stomach. He can feel fabric over his bare arms.
“Your deepest wish is to live.”
Dice knew that.
~
The world fades around him in rain-splattered watercolor, yellow and red and green dripping away in puddles. Dice blinks water from his eyelashes, collecting there. Cold rock is under his stomach but doesn’t hurt him, and beneath his jacket he’s whole. Uninjured.
He rolls over and sits up, clothes soaked through. The forest is loud, birds nesting in trees above him. Animals surround him and the forest is keenly alive, watching him.
His stomach twists, empty and hungry. He’s hungry. Dice clutches his stomach and clings tightly to the sensation, to the hunger he hasn’t felt in weeks and the vitality that floods his senses. Around him the world is awake and he wakes with it.
It takes four days for him to return to Tokyo and see his doctor, but he confirms what Dice already knew. That some strange poison flushed his body and he’s no longer dying.
He lives. His body is a thing of reverence, his mind in comfortable intimacy. Dice pulls himself from the dark of dreams with newfound respect for the flesh that holds him and he lives.