ꜱᴜʙᴊᴜɢᴀᴛᴇᴅ | [ᴛᴏᴊɪ ᴢᴇɴ'ɪɴ 𝙭 ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ 𝙭 ᴠᴀʀɪᴏᴜꜱ]

Monkeydog

TW: mentions of suicide.

Falsehood, honesty, truth, deception.

There it was again. That roiling fury that teemed and multiplied within her, the one that set her blazing with a damned teal-glazed friction, the one that forced him to reminisce his stone cold, dead wife.

"As if you care if I live or die, right Toji san?" 

Checkmate, you fucker.

His eyes rolled back so far, exposing the sclera patterned with a web of throbbing capillaries, their brilliant vermilion hue jarring against the exhausted yellow tinge that pervaded the white, that a surreal thought crossed her muddled mind: it almost appeared to her that he was somehow reaching in search for the remnants of his brain encapsulated within his thick skull. She could have laughed, in a fit of hysterics, had her horror-stricken palpitating heart not squeezed at the sight of this strange delirium. 

The truth of it wasn't too far off, as the man curled his lip in revulsion, dull recollections drawing to the surface.

-

"Enter..."

The vocal processes were sottish and guttered. This clan would always be the death of his mind, ruin of his soul, nullification of his individuality.

Toji strode forth and kneeled upon the tatami with a fist pressing firmly into the tightly woven desiccated rush grass of which it was composed, breaking the reticence. And if he allowed his lids to slide closed over his pensive forest green eyes, he could perceive the attritive sound of the fibres fraying and splintering on the near-molecular scale. It was soothing to him, the vibrations like a mantra, a sedative.

"Heh, obedient as ever, eh Toji? Now stand, you fool."

The Elder's words were like thorns digging into his cranium, drilling into his headspace. He wondered for a transient instant if he would be capable of annihilating everything in his wake, fucking it all into a blood-soaked oblivion, his brother, his cousins and the sozzled sod of a man before him.

Instead, the younger just gazed, glassy and voided, though his eyes reflected the ephemeral gold light that trickled into the room, complementing the emerald tones that flecked his irises which gave him a semblance of rare beauty.

Obedient, he stood in silence, the lines in his expressions unfathomable: there was a strange strain of quiet that pervaded the air-space, an accumulation of layers of silence, not just the mere absence of sound.

Naobito, the twenty-sixth head of the Zen'in family, split the peaceful aura of the room as he chuckled sottishly, his bizarrely combed whiskers, parallel to his brows, bouncing to the rumble his chest, the sound of liquor sloshing in his gourd cucurbit calabash hip flask. He took a swig, though it appeared near empty.

"I have a mission for you."-he grouched coarsely, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Some Lord he is, fuckin' drunk again.

"Mh."-Toji answered flatly.

"Pfff..."-spittle flew from Naobito's mouth, along with a string of alcohol-saturated saliva that dribbled to the mat-"If I didn't know how much you despise me Toji, I'd think you were lobotomised what with that imbecilic look on your face, hah!"

For Toji stared blankly, unfazed, unemotionally stolid, towards an infinite theoretical point just beyond Naobito's head, unblinking, boring holes into the unseen, phantasmagoric fabric of time and space. He remained idle, as he awaited his master's orders.