Kyo’s skin always felt like velvet under the touch. A soft tattooed masterpiece, and when Ruki woke up during the dark night full of swirling dreams, finding himself breathing and pressed face to the back of Kyo’s neck, his fingers started to dance sleepily across the ribbons of smoke and clouds, feathers and countless of skulls and faces, as if repainting them so they won’t lose their colour and fade away.

The small amount of light coming from the outside allowed him to adore the art with his eyes and fingers, in the end also with his lips as he grazed the goddess on his back and kissed it lightly. Shadows of trees were painted across the room, scattered like veins, but the canvas which was Kyo’s body was more captivating.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Kyo’s deep voice cut through the silent air like a thunder during a storm, which joins the otherwise silently falling rain into making music, and turned his body to face Ruki. Kyo didn’t know when he started to find it normal to ask the obvious. Maybe it was because he was still half asleep at the moment. It was wasting of words, he decided.

Ruki’s fingers were now caressing Kyo’s right shoulder, tracing the both thin and thick black lines which caged the blue butterfly and didn’t allow it to see any more light. He always thought the butterfly was like Kyo, flying trapped in the darkness. “I have to think.”

The black haired man let Ruki to continue dip the tips of his fingers in his tattoos softly and precisely, as if he was worried they could smudge and the artwork would be gone forever, and tried to listen to the whirling thoughts of the younger man.

If Ruki wasn’t falling in his dreams, he was being locked in an empty room, with his heartbeat echoing loud between the four walls and the moment he was slowly crossing the line between sanity and insanity, trying to get a grasp on something, he woke up.

But there were nights when he was permitted to leave the blindingly white room and walk down the hallway, to the source of a piano playing he could hear but not see somewhere in the distance. When he touched the walls, they’d ripple like water and change their glow to different colours, gluing enchanted Ruki closer and becoming transparent, showing him scenes which seemed like from movies. Those scenes he wanted to remember, so he had to speak them out – maybe if he forgets, the breeze would chime the words back to him.

The moment Ruki emptied his head, his dreams could progress and Kyo found it fascinating. The younger man lifted Kyo’s wrist and kissed the faded scars, smiling slightly against uncovered skin before letting go of what he thought was reality.

When Ruki fell asleep again, Kyo’s tattoos were shadows behind his closed eyelids.