(FIC) BUT AFTER ALL, THE HEART IS JUST AN ORGAN
Happy Belated Valentine’s Day! I wrote emotionally manipulative sisters kissing. Just something small, monstrously unedited and basic.
13+
ratings &c under the cut
warnings: incest, no sex but some underage boob groping, emotional manipulation, justification/enjoyment of and internalization of said mistreatment, general Junko horribleness and a mutual feedback loop of unhealthy attractions.
I figured why not capitalize on this conventional symbol of the holiday and drive it into the ground as despairingly as possible.
Takes place in some nebulous asshole of a pre-timeline, before they were separated when young.
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Junko lies about most things, but only sometimes.
The camera is her friend, as much as she is in the habit of keeping friendships – fondness, like pain, is a distant concept she is only absently aware of. Film captures her charisma, and Junko captures readers’ hearts and doesn’t give them back. She is consistently popular, famous on the internet and on the lips of adoring men and girls.
She’s barely out of childhood.
Junko commands attention from all angles. There is so deep a magnetism to her that even all the light in the room seems to point at her. With her eye pressed to the viewfinder, Mukuro realizes that through a lens Junko is nothing compared to her as she is standing in the middle of the room, commanding and captivating.
Unlike Mukuro, Junko filled out early and fast. Her proportions are perfect, her measurements a numerical miracle. Some days she looks twice her age and is capable of acting it - when she isn’t acting three, or ancient, or alien.
“What’s wrong? You’ve got something on your <i>faaaaaace</i>.” Junko giggles, scrapes her tongue through her teeth thoughtfully. Thinking of nothing in particular, the way she does. “Oh! That’s just you. Easy mistake.”
She smiles and winks, and it’s like someone sighting down a scope. Will whoever sees these pictures know that, before the light ever exposed the silver, there was a girl on the other side of the lens being pierced through?
“Mm. I’ve never done this before.”
“We should take some more.” Junko’s fingers fan wide under the hem of her shirt as she slides it up. Head canting to the side, she sends her fingers winding, up the center of her chest to crawl into the hollow of her throat.
Mouth desert-dry, Mukuro manages a swallow before saying, “If you’re done, then I have other things I should probably be doing.”
“My work is never done. We wouldn’t want anyone to get bored with the same-old sorry junk story.” Junko’s hands are in her hair. She’s wearing glitter, or maybe that’s just the light. Her cardigan falls lower on her legs than her shorts do: They are too tight in the inseam.
“I’m not sure these are acceptable submissions.”
“Well, we can’t just go to a purikura booth. Those might actually look like professional pictures.” Compared to yours. That’s what Junko means.
These things she says, it isn’t as though Mukuro can’t handle them. She is faster and stronger than her twin; it would be impossible to physically coerce her into anything she didn’t acquiesce to. Unless Junko took her by surprise in some unprecedented way, she can expect and endure it all. Those times Junko has dragged her across the floor by the hair or stood on her with pencil-thin stilettos, she could pull away, but there is a comfort in the misery of it. Being reminded that you are nothing is better than feeling nothing.
“It’s a shame, I guess. These submissions could show those bastards at Edge what they’re missing.”
Junko drops her pose and grows larger very quickly in the viewfinder. No surprises. Her approach is obvious and without finesse, and by the tine Mukuro lowers the camera Junko is inches from her face. Every inhale and she can smell her shampoo, her perfume, her lipgloss. Even when she inserts herself into Mukuro’s bed at night and clings fitfully to her back, she smells nice.
“Isn’t that always the problem? They can look, but they can’t … touch.” Junko takes Mukuro’s hand and places it on her breast, the warm curve filling her palm. Between her fingers, she can feel skin and stitching and not Junko’s heartbeat, but her own hammers with such ferocity that her shirt pulses along with it.
Their hands are the same size and shape. Junko’s fingers match hers perfectly when she places their hands together and presses Mukuro’s hand harder against her, flexing her fingers until they begin to close. In her head the blood pounds and pounds and whistles, a soft shrill sound in the hollow of her ear.
“There’s a lot they don’t get, right?” Now the rhythm under her fingers is noticeable. Junko’s heart beats very faintly, steady, slow.
Junko releases her fingers, but Mukuro doesn’t bring her hand away. Not yet. She fingers the buttonhole on the cardigan, drawing her palm roughly, deliberately down.
"Ouch!" Junko lies. “I know exactly what you’re thinking.” Her mischief piles up with a moan that is anything but accidental. “’No way my little sister can be so hot’, right?”
Mukuro hardly feels anything about anyone anymore, but Junko makes her feel everything at once. That’s despair, that void pooling and emptying out, nothing to everything and back to nothing, blood pulsing.
Mukuro pulls her hand away and runs until she reaches her room. Junko likes it when she runs. You can run and run and far away Junko will be there to find you because the world bends to her, bows around her like the light.
Frustration is just another forgotten, Junko-dependent emotion, interfering with calculated thought at action. She is afraid to feel.
“’… Show those bastards at Edge what they’re missing,’” she vents, pacing at the foot of her bed. They sound enough alike. That’s never been the problem. The effort Mukuro expends making the cadence of her voice match Junko’s ups and downs takes as much energy as breathing.
It’s the tantrum she cannot muster. Even shaking and pulsing with the adrenaline there is an energy Mukuro cannot muster, an attitude that is forever Junko’s and never hers. Passion cannot be fabricated, and she doesn’t care about anything.
“Oh, Sis, Sis, Sis, Sis, Sis, Mukuro, Sis. You’re getting way better at this.”
Mukuro wishes that she’d heard her coming. Draped across the doorway, Junko is haloed all around with light from the hall. Light follows her everywhere. She is wearing only the cardigan, buttons open low, her bra, no shorts.
Blood rushes not to her ears but her face, and Mukuro is hot all over with the flush from her embarrassment. Humiliation burns and it is slow.
“Can I come in?”
Junko will come in anyway, and does. Mukuro is already thinking of the way she will heel at her teasing and torment by the time her sister hugs her from behind, chest snug against her back. Warm and heavy, like the swell of her breast in her palm.
The stick and shine of lip gloss clings to the nape of her neck where Junko kisses her. She clasps her hands over Mukuro’s heart; even when the fingers sneak beneath her collar she lets them splay and linger there. Their hands are the same size and shape, but Mukuro’s fingers are already growing calluses and Junko pastes rhinestones on the tips of her nails.
“You’re so cute when you try to be better than you are. My brave, strong big sister. ”