18. Tobirama
We showered for over an hour.
We didn't have any more sex, just stood in the hot water pouring down on us, holding each other tight. His body felt soft and small against mine, yet steady, like an iceberg with most of its mass beneath the surface. The whole setting was incredibly romantic, the bathroom walls made of the same terracotta-red tiles as the rest of the church, the showerhead made of brass. The bathroom filled up with mist in an instant until we could barely see anything but each other, which was honestly exactly the way we wanted it at that moment.
"Izuna, you're trembling..."
"The rashes..."
Oh... I held him close to me then, my arms around his shoulder blades, and he, in turn, clung to me.
"Never do that again. You hear me?"
"Yes."
"You promise?"
"Yes."
The relief I felt was palpable because I whole-heartedly believed Izuna was a man to keep his promises. After our shower, I looked him in his eyes while drying him with a towel.
"I'm sorry about your brother", I said.
Izuna looked down. "Thank you."
"I found your note." Izuna jerked. "Sorry, it was on your bed, and I was in a panic. What did you mean by it?"
Izuna looked incredibly heartbroken then. "There was one last thing we could try for Madara. A new drug, a monoclonal antibody. It's on experimental stage, but it has had promising results with young cancer patients. But I couldn't afford it anymore." He got tears in his eyes, and they started streaming down his face. Izuna had a strange quality to his crying; he could cry with tears without altering his face or his voice. It was incredibly interesting to me. "I feel terribly guilty. I just keep going over and over in my head the things I could have done to actually pay for it."
"Izuna, no!" I said immediately. He looked at me questioningly. "I'm sorry, it's just... No." I put my fingers to my temples, naked still in the bathroom, Izuna swept in my towel in front of me. It would be blood-stained from the rashes in his back. He opened it up, and I stepped in, hugged him close. "I won't tell you 'You're not sure it would've helped' or anything like that. I know you would have thought it was worth a shot. But you did more than enough. Honestly, I think you did too much."
"What do you mean?"
"You suffered in order to pay for your brother's treatment. Even if you knew he had no way out. You became homeless. You were raped, for Christ's sake. I didn't know your brother, but I don't think he would've liked how far you went." I felt Izuna tremble then, and I immediately regretted my words. "Sorry", I said, planting a kiss on the top of his head. "I'm so sorry, it's not my place to-"
"No", Izuna interrupted softly. "I'm just relieved. Hearing it from you... It makes a difference, you know?" I took his hand then, led him to the bedroom where we both got dressed in clean clothes. "You're so good, Tobes."
I looked down, uncomfortable. No-one had ever really complimented me before, and I wasn't entirely sure how to handle it. "I do my best."
We lay down in bed then, closer to him than I'd ever felt to God. What am I doing with my life believing in something that wants to take this away from me? We talked for a while, about anything, really, until I heard Izuna's breaths become slow and symmetrical. Then, I gave him a glance and stood up.
Barefoot, I tip-toed over the stone floors of the top floor of the church, my feet whispering over the cold, uneven surface. I went down the stairs to the church itself, then down to the cellar. I walked down the corridor, trembling, until I reached the door, and opened it. I stood in the doorway, took off all my clothes again until I, for the second time that night, stood naked. I went to the wall, took the discipline from its place, stroke it. Izuna... It was covered in a mixture of his dried blood and mine, and the picture of him slumped and bloody on the floor created a lump in my throat that I wanted to throw up. I bit down hard, tried to ignore it, to shut down my feelings as I always did in here. Then, I lifted my hand...
And nothing.
Absolutely, purely nothing.
I couldn't do it.
Or, I could do it, but I didn't want to.
The picture of Izuna swam before my eyes, burned on my retina forever, causing me to not only hesitate, but to refrain.
No, I thought. Just no.
I didn't think much about it. Just went to the wall and hung the rope back up.
Then I turned and went to the door, put my clothes on. The soft fabric of my T-shirt felt amazing against my non-bloody skin.
I closed the door behind me, not even looking back but up front to the corridor that led back to Izuna.
That was the last time I was in that room.
I never used the discipline again for the rest of my life.
Two weeks passed, and we became like a couple. We slept in the same bed. We showered together. We fucked. Or, rather, I fucked him. I was insatiable, as if my body was trying to make up for all the sex it had been deprived of, but yet, so was he. We worked perfectly together in bed, Izuna beneath me but eager, craving me and working so hard for me it made my heart burst.
I attended Madara's funeral alongside Izuna, a small gathering of just him and some friend. On Wednesdays, I kept bringing sushi home, as Izuna had said how grateful he was for that small routine in his life. He started going with me to the gym, and turned out he was an insane cyclist.
"I used to compete as a teenager", he smirked when I stared at him after a two hour wild spinning ride he'd made while I lifted weights.
All in all, he seemed to do well.
That was, until...
"Honey, I'm home!" I shouted up the stairs, walking up them with the paper bag of sushi for our Wednesday dinner.
I found him on the mattress, sitting down on his knees, slumped over.
"Oh my God, Izuna, what's wrong?"
He looked up at me, and tears were streaming down his face. It didn't match his incredibly fresh sense of dressing; his black, ripped jeans, white t-shirt and unbuttoned, checked shirt on top of that, his hair loose with a thickly knitted beanie on top.
"It's..." his voice was wobbling, and that's when I realised how serious this must be. I dropped the bag, went and sat next to him. He broke down, leaning over my knees and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I didn't say anything, just put one hand on his back, patted his thick scars over the fabric of his clothes, the other hand caressing his head. He sobbed for a good ten minutes until he started to hiccup. Once he calmed down, I went to get him a glass of water, figuring he must be dehydrated, and he gulped it down gratefully, having lost an ocean in his tears. I didn't press him further, just waited for him to tell me, if he wanted to. He lay down over my knees, and I stroke his back, used my nails to draw soft patterns of love for him.
"Madara..." he began. "He had asked them to do a genetic test on him for the cancer, since he'd gotten it so young. But he didn't want it to be carried out until after his death." I really, really didn't like where this was going. "They've done it now. They found a mutation..." His voice started to wobble again. "It's a dominant mutation meaning you only need it in one of the two alleles on your chromosomes in order for you to be affected by it. It basically gives you a guarantee of cancer at a very young age. And the cancer is always fatal, like it was for Madara."
"How-" I swallowed. "How much of a guarantee?"
"A hundred percent. Everyone with the mutation gets cancer in about their thirties, at the latest."
I was trembling. "But your parents? One of them must have had it if Madara got it. And none of them..."
Izuna shook his head. "The mutation was present in the gametes of either our father or mother. The eggs or sperms. Meaning it didn't affect the one who got it, mum or dad, but they could carry it on to their children. It could also have been a de novo mutation in the embryo that became my brother, but that's very rare for this mutation, only 0,01 percent."
"And you..." I couldn't speak.
He started fiddling with the fabric of my trousers at my knee. "Fifty percent. There's a fifty percent risk I have the mutation as well."
I knew it was coming.
I knew it was coming, yet nothing could have prepared me for it.
God opened up a hole in the ground and swallowed me up into hell on Earth.
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